Reading the <i>Journey to the Orient</i>: Between Reality and Imagination


Sanbay S. G.

LITERA-JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE LITERATURE AND CULTURE STUDIES, sa.2, ss.451-464, 2020 (ESCI) identifier

Özet

Gerard de Nerval, who created his travel writings by considering the romantic viewpoint within the framework of realism, described the various spaces, lives, people, events, etc. that he witnessed. Meanwhile, geocriticism, which is a method of literary analysis and theory that incorporates the semiotics of geographic space, tackles this issue through different methods. As for geocritical theory, while the center of a narrative discourse is the space, space semiotics examines the area in which the space and the subject's points of existence merge. Thus, the present study focuses on the representation of Istanbul in the Journey to the Orient by Gerard de Nerval. More specifically, it interprets the data based on the theory of Orientalism by propounded by Edward W. Said in his book of the same name. As a result, it will help determine whether the binary categories are imaginary/real or foreign/familiar, while belonging to the observed, sensed, and represented space.