nám. Jana Palacha 1/2
Lecturer: Petr Kučera (Hamburg).
Annotation:
It has been assumed by scholars that, in the Ottoman world, autobiographies were extremely rare due to the collectivist nature of the Ottoman-Islamic culture where adherence to a fixed canon of narrative instruments and a strict separation between the public and the private formed an obstacle to the individualistic expression of the Self. This lecture will show that it is rather our fixation on certain genres that hinders us to see autobiographical traits in texts that usually do not fit the category “autobiography”. Furthermore, it will offer an analysis of one of the most famous Ottoman-Turkish autobiographical works, Osman Ağa’s fascinating account of his captivity in Austria and his subsequent carrier as interpreter and diplomat for the Imperial Court (written 1724-1725).
The lecture is a part of the series Me and the World … Autobiography in Medieval and Early Modern Europe.
