ELIF SHAFAK’S ​THE FORTY RULES OF LOVE ​BETWEEN CONSTRUCTIVE AND DISRUPTIVE COSMOPOLITANISMS

Year 2020, Volume: 2 Issue: 2, 138 - 151, 25.12.2020

Melih Kökcü

Abstract

In contemporary literature, cosmopolitanism has become more significant for fiction as it narrates today’s crucial nonhomogeneous political, social, and cultural issues. In a cosmopolitan context, authors respond to the needs of contemporary readerships by writing beyond nation, border, and topicality. Approaching otherness, migration, and mobility with a positive attitude, cosmopolitanism allegedly offers tools to negotiate with “the other” that transcend xenophobia and parochialism. This positive approach to “the other'' is presented in Elif Shafak’s 2010 novel, The Forty Rules of Love through the binary of localism-supralocalism and particularism-universalism. The book merges the fictionalized biography of the Persian-Turkish Sufi poet known to the West as Rumi, and the story of a Jewish-American housewife seeking spiritual renaissance in her monotonous life. Shafak managed to place her novel on the Turkish, American, and global literary markets due to her weaving of particular and universal narratives in the novel, but she creates her own notion of cosmopolitanism by appropriating vernacular stories and building transnational narratives out of them. Shafak’s decontextualization of Rumi’s biography in the novel is problematic since it distorts indigenous stories to meet the demands of global readerships and their cosmopolitan imaginaries. In her novel, Shafak does not offer co-evolution of the global and local actors; rather, the novel revolves around inextricable cosmopolitanism. This paper focuses on cosmopolitanism in Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love not only as positive mode but also as generative of disruptive misrepresentations of Rumi.

Keywords

Cosmopolitanism, Anglophone Literature, Turkish Literature, Elif Shafak, Rumi

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