Charriere, Etienne Eugene

University of Michigan

Research Topic: The Trans-communal Emergence of the Novel in the Late Ottoman

Dr. Charriere completed his PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan in 2016. During his stay at ANAMED, he will work on a book project, entitled We Must Ourselves Write About Ourselves: The Trans-communal Emergence of the Novel in the Late Ottoman Empire, 1840–1908, which surveys the development of prose fiction in the late Ottoman period within a comparative framework and includes examples from Ottoman-Turkish, Greek, Armenian, and Ladino literatures. This project aims to overcome the fragmentation of previous monolingual scholarly approaches by presenting a more inclusive narrative highlighting the trans-communal complexity of late-Ottoman novel culture and by contributing new data that sheds light on the literary relations between ethno-linguistic groups in the Empire from the Tanzimat reforms to the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. In an effort to study the trans-communal rise of the novel in the late Ottoman Empire, his project gives equal attention to the texts and their larger cultural contexts, combining the tools and methodologies of literary analysis, historical research, and sociological inquiry. His corpus includes novels written in Ottoman-Turkish, Greek, Armenian, and Ladino and published in the Ottoman Empire between the early 1840s and the beginning of the twentieth century, as well as a large number of translations of Western novels into the aforementioned languages, which he treats as creative works in their own right, to be analyzed as sites of literary and cultural mediation and experimentation.