Comparing Non-European Literatures – Dances of Mori Ōgai’s The Dancing Princess and Sabahattin Ali’s Madonna in a Fur Coat to the Music of Goethe

Abstract

Comparative literature explores the influences of older “texts” on newer ones, through a cross-cultural, interdisciplinary, and multilingual perspective. Another common practice of comparative analysis is to study how Euro-American literary texts inspire non-European ones, and vice versa. Yet, there is a methodological gap concerning the comparative studies that focus on non-European texts with no “direct” intertextual connection. On this basis, arguably, one of the most intriguing and creative ways of comparing two or more non-European works is to spot their common source texts. It is certainly not the only method of comparing non-Western texts, but it is indubitably an efficient method for positivistic intertextual analysis. This article aims to present a “case study” that may serve as a model for comparing non-European literatures. To this end, we focused on two works from Turkish and Japanese literatures that share remarkable resemblances, yet that do not have direct intertextual bonds: Mori Ōgai’s The Dancing Princess and Sabahattin Ali’s Madonna in a Fur Coat. As the major common source text that both refer to is Goethe’s Faust, we traced how these two similar non-European works are affected by Faust, and how their intertextual dances with Faust contributed to their national and international literary reputations.

Keywords

• comparative literature
• modern turkish literature
• modern japanese literature
• woman studies
• translation