Copy For Citation
Aydın İ.
Comparative Methods Symposium: Worlds, Institutions, Disciplines , London, England, 25 June 2025, (Unpublished)
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Publication Type:
Conference Paper / Unpublished
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City:
London
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Country:
England
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Istanbul Gelisim University Affiliated:
Yes
Abstract
Comparative Literature
has always defined itself in crisis. Since its emergence, the field has been
entangled with the historical rise of the nation-state and national
literatures, and each shift in global structure—political, institutional, or
epistemic—has demanded new methods of comparison. Today’s disciplinary
uncertainty reflects a deeper transformation: not only of institutions, but of
literature itself.
This position paper
explores how fantasy literature, long excluded from canonical models of
Comparative and World Literature, opens new horizons for method. Drawing on
Itamar Even-Zohar’s polysystem theory and the global circulation of works by
J.R.R. Tolkien and Barış Müstecaplıoğlu, I argue that fantasy’s marginality in
institutional discourse masks its centrality in cultural life. Fantasy
literature functions as a transnational, symbolic, and allegorical mode of
storytelling that parallels premodern cosmopolitan literary systems such as the
Islamic and Latin Christian traditions. These older systems, like fantasy,
operated beyond national boundaries, using shared symbolic codes to structure
ethical and metaphysical reflection.
As realist narrative
falters in representing an accelerating, fragmented reality, fantasy offers
narrative strategies that reconnect literature to human meaning-making. In a
time when literature has lost cultural primacy to digital media and AI,
fantasy’s narrative ecosystems—fan cultures, imagined communities,
non-institutional storytelling—offer a glimpse into new comparative horizons.
Fantasy literature, in
this sense, is not merely a genre but a methodological provocation. It
challenges Comparative Literature to see the margins as productive sites of
innovation. Including these "peripheral" modes of literary production
not only renews the field's critical capacity, but also reconnects it with
literature’s oldest function: storytelling across difference.