The Hotel Narrative in Turkish, Mexican and Bengali Fiction
Ian Almond
Abstract: It is a great honor to be able to speak at this webinar,1 and I thank the ULAB authorities for giving me this time. I came to ULAB a year ago, and I have very fond memories of Dhanmondi and all the friendliness and hospitality I received. The feeling is definitely reciprocated.
Today I am going to talk a little bit about the hotel in world literature. I am going to go through it as quickly as possible without getting too bogged down in the minutiae of what the text says. We are looking at three hotel novels. The talk is based on a chapter of my new book, World Literature Decentered. I think it is important to start by saying why I am talking about Mexico, Turkey, and Bengal. The book largely comes out of a series of frustrations with current concepts of world literature and world history, concepts which I, and an increasing number of scholars, feel are overwhelmingly Euro-American in nature. I always begin by saying that the West is ten percent of the planet or that Europe and America make up ten percent of the planet. So the non-West is not some token minority that needs our attention – it is the overwhelming majority of this world. So that really is the wider context here. Instead of theoretically deconstructing notions of world literature, I am trying really to performatively engage with it through three non-Western regions, and those three regions, those three literary traditions if you like, are Turkey, Bengal, and Mexico. And there are about fi ve topics that I choose: I look at melancholy, I look at the ghost story, I look at Orientalism … but one of those chapters is on the hotel.
Keywords: Hotel Narrative, Turkish, Mexican, Bengali, Fiction
Published in September 2021