English Test 110
Directions for Questions from 1 to 4:
Leslie A. Adelson, whom Andreas Huyssen has accurately called “the leading scholar in the field of ‘Turkish- German literature,’” seeks in her latest
book to redefine those often arbitrarily applied terms “Turkish” and “German.” Adelson adamantly advocates for understanding “Turkish” and
“German” less as historically loaded labels and more as the names of two living cultures that exist essentially inside one another. Although her title
includes the phrase “A New Critical Grammar of Migration,” much of the secondary material, analysis, and primary texts are not so new at all.
Instead, Adelson has based this book on at least three previous journal articles and one conference paper.Readers familiar with Adelson’s previous
articles will find themselves rereading key passages from tho se publications transplanted verbatim into the book manuscript. In addition, they will
find that the chief aims of the articles have much in common with the book’s goals as well. Knowing this research history, one central question
emerged for me as a reviewer: what would motivate readers to devote time to a book that at first glance simply seems to repeat previously-
published material? As I read further, however, more and more valid reasons became clear.
One general answer might be that, although Adelson obviously incorporates previous research, The Turkish Turn just as clearly indicates steady
development and productive expansion of theoretical ideas that address viewing Turkish literature as an inextricable part of German culture. One
more specific answer is that Adelson’s new twist more intently considers “the literature of Turkish migration as part of an evolving national tradition
of Holocaust memory in Germany” . By reorganizing and supplementing old material, the author, in her own words, attempts to broach the “relative
novum in German literature” of the “sustained combination of story lines about Turkish migration and twentieth-century German history” .
In mo