Video Recordings of ‘From Usul to Method: The Literature Historiography of M. Fuad Köprülü’

We commemorated M. Fuad Köprülü on the 130th anniversary of his birth, as the Department of Turkish Language and Literature at Samsun University, on Friday, December 4, 2020, with the program titled “From Usul to Method: The Literature Historiography of M. Fuad Köprülü” For those who could not attend or want to listen later, video recordings of the symposium were edited and published.

The event, held on the online meeting platform Zoom, started with the opening speech of Selim Sırrı Kuru from the University of Washington at 10:00. The video recording of Kuru’s spech is below.

Following the opening speech of Selim Sırrı Kuru, the first panel started at 10.30, again moderated by Selim Sırrı Kuru. The session, which started with Şaban Sağlık’s speech titled In the Context of Köprülü’s Article of Method “Opening the Determined Semantic Codes for Discussion”, continued with Halim Kara’s speech titled “From Ottoman Empire to the Republic: Formation of Modern History of Literature in Turkey” The last speech of the first session was Günil Özlem Ayaydın Cebe’s statement titled ” Method or Nation in the History of Literature”. The session with high interest ended after the Q&A session.

In the second session, which started after the break, Fatih Altuğ gave his speech titled Evolution in the Article of “Method in the History of Turkish Literature” firstly under the moderation of Şaban Sağlık. Taking the floor in the second speech, Alphan Akgül made his speech titled From Stability to Action: Why does Constituent Literature Need Historical Construction? After Akgül, Atiye Gülfer Gündoğdu discussed Literary Historiography and the Problem of Reception in Köprülü and Jauss. The last speaker of the panel was our faculty member Mustafa Uğur Karadeniz. The second session was completed with the Q&A session following Karadeniz’s speech titled An Answer to M. Fuad Köprülü’s Criticism of Classical Literary Aesthetics.

The last session, which started at 15:00, started with Emrah Pelvanoğlu’s speech titled “Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar and the Historical Imagination in the XIX. Century History of Turkish Literature”, moderated by Günil Özlem Ayaydın Cebe. After Pelvanoğlu, Mustafa Altuğ Yayla talked about the A Köprülü Heritage?: The Problem of “Foreign” Influences in the Islamic Literary Culture of Diyâr-ı Rûm. Then, our department research assistant, Kaan Kurt, presented his speech titled “The Place of Intertextuality in Köprülü’s Literary Historiography”. The last speech of the panel and the conference was the speech titled The Case of Vagueness in Köprülü’s Literary Topos: History and Interpretation by our department chair and faculty member Servet Gündoğdu.

After the last panel, a productive and long Q&A session took place. Wishes were presented to repeat the dialogue environment created by the conference, which showed great interest and commemorated Köprülü on its 130th anniversary.