Brand new: Turkish poetry and aesthetic autonomy on the modernist periphery

Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/9781009753258.007

This chapter reads the work of experimental poets who emerged in the 1950s in Turkey. The loose poetic movement known as İkinci Yeni (the Second New) was radical in the context of mid-century Turkish letters for its dense language, unusual images, and intentional flouting of conventional grammatical and syntactical rules. When this new style of poetry appeared around 1956, İkinci Yeni gave rise to a vigorous and sometimes vicious debate between its defenders and detractors. In hindsight, the central locus of this conflict can be seen as positions taken for and against aesthetic autonomy, the sine qua non of literary modernism. In order to challenge Eurocentric narratives of modernism that take concepts such as aesthetic autonomy for granted in terms of when and how they appeared, this chapter attends to the ways local histories of capitalist modernization and political developments help shape the appearance of modernist literature in geographies like the Middle East.