Zehra Çirak and the Aporia of Dialogism

Abstract

In her 1999 article, “‘Innere Unruhe’? Zehra Çirak and Minority Literature Today,” Marilya Veteto-Conrad describes how Çirak, like many other writers in Germany of Turkish origin, rejects the label “Turkish German” and the idea of multicultural dialogue that presupposes not only the existence of two relatively fixed identities but the correspondence of text and context. In “Ethnic Irony: The Poetic Parabasis of the Promiscuous Personal Pronoun in Yoko Tawada’s ‘Eine leere Flasche,’“ John Kim argues that the practice of reading figures of ethnicity assumes a continuity between social context and poetic text to the extent that “wherever an ethnic appears writing, its writing appears ethnic” (334). Kim’s insights into the relationship between the literary element of irony, which is “played out between two opposed figures that are in fact one” (348), and the problem of reading ethnicity build on the de Man-influenced work of Leslie Adelson and her understanding of the problem of referentiality, or what she calls the “riddle of referen-tiality,” in reference to the aporetic relation between social context and literary text.

Whether the passage from otherness to the recognition of the other, the passage, in other words, from dialogism to dialogue, can be said to take place in Bakhtin as more than a desire, remains a question for Bakhtin interpretation to consider in the proper critical spirit.

(Paul de Man, “Dialogism and Dialogue”)