Fluid Books, Fluid Borders Modern Greek and Turkish Book Networks in a Shifting Sea

Abstract

This dissertation tells the stories of a half dozen Greek and Turkish books that refused to “stay put”: books that, despite their appearance of stability today, moved across multiple media, editions, alphabets, bindings and geographies, taken apart and reassembled in deeply transformative ways during a period of momentous change in the Eastern Mediterranean, roughly 1910-1960.

The signal event of this change was the Ottoman Empire’s collapse in 1923, after which the Greek and Turkish nation-states pushed to radically reshape the region through a series of partitions. Book networks too were being reassembled along national lines, a process whose ultimate aim was the production of a fixed national corpus, purified of linguistic and typographic variation. Nonetheless, careful examination suggests that many of the region’s textual networks were anything but stable or pure. The books of my study often blurred the boundaries between production, circulation and consumption, between writer and reader, and, at times, between Greek and Turkish. They behaved in many ways more like pre-modern manuscripts than modern books.

I argue, in fact, that “the book has never been modern”—not even in the twentieth century, when it had supposedly been fixed in place by international copyright, national philology departments and commercial standardization. The narrative of twentieth-century fixity, frequently implicit and occasionally explicit in Book History, derives in part from the field’s Eurocentric origins. In the Greco-Turkish Mediterranean, a different story emerges. Building an innovative bridge between Book History and Mediterranean studies, I view the Greco-Turkish book as a “middle space”: a semi-fluid medium that, resisting the nation-state’s partitions, continued to be assembled and reassembled by a heterogeneous webwork of hands and materials.

Methodologically, how does one approach such a “middle space”? Adapting Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory and Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “assemblage,” I treat the book as a network, one whose ongoing assemblage we can spread out across a flat and open plane. Since these assemblages are nested, in something close to a mathematical fractal, I trace similar patterns on several scales, ranging from the typographic to the aesthetic to the geographic. On every scale, I follow the fluid “border-crossings” of books, facilitated by their several handlers.

To conceptualize these crossings, the concept of the metaphor is particularly useful. In both ancient and modern Greek, a metaphora is an act not only of (1) moving an aesthetic conceit between linguistic symbols (as in English); but, more fundamentally, of (2) physically moving an object from point A to B. As the books of my study aesthetically moved their handlers, so too did the handlers physically move the books forward in time and space, preserving them only by transformatively transmitting them through a series of hands and forms.

Ultimately, I work my way towards the ideal of the “commons-place” book, which combines the commonplace book with notions of the political commons, asking how a material medium might become the site of collective, un-authorized literary production. The philologist’s role here, I argue, is nothing more or less than the “curation” of this book-network, reassembling both its literary objects and their human handlers in a shared space—one that will allow each actor to speak, to hear and be heard. Through such a curation, which necessarily invites the agencies of a heterogeneous (and contentious) multiplicity of handlers, we can begin to reassemble the commons.