READING OTTOMAN MODERNITY THROUGH ILLUSTRATED MEDIUM: SERVET-İ FÜNUN AND NON-OTTOMAN BUILT ENVIRONMENT IMAGES

Date

2025-2-3

Author

Gündeş, Feridun

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

85
views

0
downloads

Cite This

In the late Ottoman publishing world, Ahmed İhsan stands out with his commitment and innovative approach to publishing, and his illustrated weekly journal Servet-i Fünun stands out with its longevity, consistency, and impact. With its transnational connections and domestic reach, Servet-i Fünun appears as a significant actor of the period, and a self-described mediator of modernization. Although it is more commonly associated with literature, its content covers a wide range of scientific, technological, practical, and life topics. Because being illustrated was a distinguishing trait for Servet-i Fünun, images were an important part its content. A considerable number of these images features built environments from outside the Ottoman Empire. This study situates Servet-i Fünun as a site of performance, which was embodied by publishing activities centered around its production. Based on the non-Ottoman built environment images and their accompanying texts it published from 1891 until 1914, it explores journal’s discourse on modernity. It argues that this discourse is structured around three components of modernity: globalization, civilization and progress, which are explored in detail. Furthermore, it demonstrates that the journal did not completely embrace or adhere to the western modernity. Rather, it selectively adopted it to create its own distinct version, which was mostly based on the western interpretation, but also had aspects that contradicted or rejected it.

Subject Keywords

Servet-i Fünun, Late Nineteenth Century Ottoman Illustrated Journals, Ahmed İhsan, Civilization, Progress, Globalization of Modernity

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/113406

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis