Date of Award
Spring 6-6-2025
Document Type
M.A. Essay
First Advisor
Eman Morsi
Second Advisor
Txetxu Aguado
Abstract
In the context of modern Sephardic literature, this paper defines “textual space” as the narrative’s self-conscious arrangement of its own textual elements such as time, space, and language to negotiate a position vis-à-vis the nation-state that is neither fully subsumed within nor completely outside of it. Textual spaces neither conform to the nation state’s borders even though they write from it, nor to nationalist temporalities as they continue a narrative thread that reaches back to 15th-century Spain. Through Myriam Moscona’s Tela de sevoya (2012) and Mario Levi’s Istanbul Was a Fairytale (1999), this paper investigates how textual spaces are deliberately created to mirror the spatial, temporal and linguistic dimensions of Sephardic literary imaginary and historical consciousness. Constructed through and within language, textual spaces also act as exploration sites for Judeo-Spanish’s linguistic status in contemporary texts: silently visible or loudly invisible. Methodologically, textual spaces call for a close reading attuned to the insights of distant reading, and a distant reading that is capable of strategically shifting into proximity when necessary. As such, this paper positions textual spaces in the gap that emerges between the shifting scales of the word and the world.
Recommended Citation
Cetin, Inci, "Between Word and World: Textual Space in Modern Sephardic Literature" (2025). Comparative Literature M.A. Essays. 198.
https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/complit_essays/198
Included in
Comparative Literature Commons, Jewish Studies Commons, Latin American Literature Commons, Near Eastern Languages and Societies Commons
