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[University of Texas at Austin] Turkish Literature in Translation Reading Group: The Mosquito Bite Author by Barış Bıçakçı
September 30, 2021 @ 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm CDT
Turkish Literature in Translation Reading Group: The Mosquito Bite Author by Barış Bıçakçı
with translator Dr. Matthew Chovanec
Thursday September 30, 2021 • via Zoom
3:00 PM – 4:30 PM
Register to attend this event here.
The Turkish Literature in Translation Reading Group aims to gather those who are interested in Turkish literature at UT together. It meets each month throughout the semester and the discussions are held in English. This semester, due to COVID-19 circumstances, all of our discussions will be held virtually, through Zoom. The meetings are open to the entire UT community, as well as interested individuals outside UT. For your questions, please contact İpek Sahinler at ipeksahinler@utexas.edu
The Mosquito Bite Author follows in the great tradition of the “Turkish Oblomov” by focusing on someone who initially seems to be an undeserving protagonist—much like the titular character in Ivan Goncharov’s work. Borrowing from the narcissistic, petty-bourgeois male novels before it, it relishes in the mundane and the self-absorbed. Cemil stares wistfully at jars of jam, yells at soccer matches, and mopes around the apartment until his wife Nazlı gets home. He has written a manuscript, yes, but as we wait along with him to hear back from the publisher, we aren’t sure whether or not it will end up justifying the attention we’ve given him. If it’s a work of genius, then all of Cemil’s aphorisms and insights will prove to have been profound and poetic. If it is rejected, then we will have spent 150 pages following another one of those failed writer characters we so often get from authors who “don’t have the emotional depth needed to write normal characters,” as Cemil himself notes.
Matthew Chovanec is a writer and teacher specializing in the literature, digital culture, and ecology of the Middle East. His work has appeared in numerous online publications and peer-reviewed publications, and he currently has two published book translations. This summer he published a open resource textbook on exploring digital Arabic culture and he is currently researching the bioregional turath of the Euphrates River in the work of Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri.
Sponsored by: the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, and Program in Comparative Literature
For more information on the event, please go to the event page.