Department of Humanities and Social Sciences

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10679/5962

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Ayfer Tunç'un modernizmle derdi: faillik ve iktidar
(Celal Bayar Üniversitesi, 2017) Günay-Erkol, Çimen; Humanities and Social Sciences; ERKOL, Çimen Günay
Türk edebiyatının önde gelen çağdaş yazarlarından biri olan Ayfer Tunç, romanlarında modernizmin açmazlarına vurgu yapmakta ve modernleşen dünyada, toplumdan ve doğadan yabancılaşan insanların çelişkilerine yer vermektedir. Tunç’un edebiyatında, “özgürlük”, “karar alabilme” ve “doğruyu arama” gibi temalar, modernizme ilişkin çeşitli toplumsal ve siyasal sorunlarla birleşerek genişler ve etkinleşir. Kamusal alan, bir ortak dünya yaratma eylemi olarak bu temalar çerçevesinde değerlendirilir. Tunç’un modernizmle hesaplaşma çabası, tıpkı 20. yüzyılın en önemli düşünürlerinden biri olan ve kitle siyaseti üzerine çalışan Hannah Arendt’inki gibi, “faillik”, “iktidar”, “kamusal alan”, “kötülük”, “şiddet” gibi kavramların gözden geçirilmesini de gerektirmektedir. Bu makalede, Tunç ve Arendt bir araya getirilmekte ve modernizmin bazı çıkmazlarını nasıl tartışmaya açtıkları ele alınmaktadır. Arendt’in ünlü “kötüğün sıradanlığı” kavramlaştırması, modernizme getirilen önemli bir eleştiri olarak tarihteki yerini almıştır. Tunç’un 2014’te yayımlanan romanı Dünya Ağrısı, Arendt’in altını çizdiği “kötülüğün sıradanlığı”nı gözler önüne sererken, yazarın 2009’da yayımlanan romanı Bir Deliler Evinin Yalan Yanlış Anlatılan Kısa Tarihi, bu kavramın önüne bir de “deliliğin sıradanlığı”nı eklemektedir. Bu makalede, Tunç’un iki romanından yola çıkılarak, yazarın modernizmde sezdiği ve kendine has bir üslupla edebiyata dönüştürdüğü çıkmazlara yer verilmiş ve bu çıkmazlar Arendt’in kuramsal tartışmaları ışığında ele alınmıştır.
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Constructions of masculinity in the Middle East and North Africa: Literature, film, and national discourse
(Duke University Press, 2022-07) Günay-Erkol, Çimen; Humanities and Social Sciences; ERKOL, Çimen Günay
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From competitive to multidirectional memory: a literary tool for comparison
(Taylor & Francis, 2018) Günay-Erkol, Çimen; Sert, Deniz Şenol; International Relations; Humanities and Social Sciences; ERKOL, Çimen Günay; SERT, Deniz
Recent research shows that Turkish society is very polarized and that different identities and ideological perspectives are in constant struggle with each other. In a multicultural society such as Turkey’s, the question of how to think about the relationship between different social groups’ histories of victimization becomes crucial. Following Michael Rothberg’s conceptualization of multi-directional memory – beyond competitive memory, this article presents an archive for comparative work through a data set of novels on the military coups in Turkey. The major argument here is that while these novels are promoting the idea of competitive memory as a zero-sum game, if it is looked at more closely, there are traces of multi-directionality, of ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing. Doing so, it is argued, would help to reframe justice in the society, where different victimizations are not competing with each other, but start to talk to each other. This article is an attempt to create a literary tool of comparison on different stories of victimization as a first step towards transitional justice in a polarized society.
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Gender of trauma in İstanbul İstanbul
(Taylor & Francis, 2020-09-01) Günay-Erkol, Çimen; Humanities and Social Sciences; ERKOL, Çimen Günay
Burhan Sönmez’s İstanbul İstanbul (2016) is a powerful addition to contemporary prison novels in Turkey. The novel revolves around prisoners who experience systematic torture and are unable to escape the grim destruction that surrounds them. The discussions in the novel around Islamic faith, free will, solitude and captivity produce self-reflexive stories of memory and forgetting, in which gender also comes to the fore as an important center of gravity. In this grand scheme of brutality and torture, the only female prisoner, Zinê Sevda, is limited to sign language, and she facilitates men’s transformative recognition of their trauma through her ghostly presence. In this article, I explore how Zinê Sevda’s silent witnessing transforms men into overseers of themselves and comment on the implications of her sign language. I argue Sönmez’s play with traumatic memory and its resilience is an excellent metaphor for the recurrence of military tutelage in Turkey.
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Issues of ideology and identity in Turkish literature during the Cold War
(2013) Günay-Erkol, Çimen; Humanities and Social Sciences; Ornek, C.; Ungor, C.; ERKOL, Çimen Günay
In the Cold War era, the period from the end of the Second World War to the fall of the Berlin Wall, Turkey was dominated by efforts of democratization and liberalization, economic growth and instability, intellectual and political quarrels, three successful (1960, 1971, and 1980) and two abortive military coups (1962 and 1963), and armed aggression in the streets which reached a peak toward the end of 1970s. The ruins left by military dictatorships are still relatively unexplored, and the neoliberal structure and hegemonic discourses introduced by them still influence contemporary life. The Cold War has left an imprint not only in literature but also in daily language, and its legacy is very much alive. The Turkish dictionary prepared and made online by the state-supported Turkish Language Association (TDK), for example, gives Moskof gâvuru (infidel of Moscow) as a synonym for the word Rus (Russian), linking an ethnic identity to a political system (the ideal of a Moscow-centered international dictatorship) and religious otherness at the same time.
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Mad patriots: Militarized masculinities and nation- building in contemporary Turkish novels
(Taylor & Francis, 2021) Günay-Erkol, Çimen; Humanities and Social Sciences; ERKOL, Çimen Günay
Nationalist discourse in Turkey is replete with metaphors of militarism, and is built on hierarchies of ethnicity, class, and, of course, gender.
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Netice-I sa’y ve kayınvalide: Şehrin emek coğrafyası
(Istanbul University, 2021) Günay-Erkol, Çimen; Humanities and Social Sciences; ERKOL, Çimen Günay
The author Mehmet Tahir, an officer in the editorial office of the accounting section of the Customs Office, followed Ahmet Midhat's recommendation to discuss economics in fiction in order to promote commerce and entrepreneurship. His long story Netice-i Sa'y (1893-4) shows dramatic scenes from the life of a boy who departs from an Arabic port and arrives in Istanbul alone and penniless, and, with great effort, starts a new life. Mehmet Tahir, imitating Ahmet Midhat, advises the reader about labor; he uses the transformation of the boy in terms of his economic conditions in Istanbul around Ottoman economic morals to discuss themes such as work, patience, and the entrepreneurial spirit. In his Kayinvalide, which was published a year later, the question of how labor can be fairly shared in a family is explicitly at the center. A mother wants her son to marry an ugly girl, to make her an obedient domestic worker at home. But her son falls in love with the ugly bride chosen by his mother, and defends her against his mother, who attempts to treat her like a slave at home. Mehmet Tahir deals with the new generation's resistance to old traditions and emphasizes in this story that the supervision of justice at home is what sustains a family. Mehmet Tahir explored the labor geography of Istanbul in and out of the home. This paper explores the emphasis on justice in Mehmet Tahir's texts together with his views on the question of prioritizing personal good over common good and his views on family as the basic building block of society.
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Post-imperial crises and liminal masculinity in Orhan Kemal’s My Father’s House–The Idle Years
(Wiley, 2012-09) Günay-Erkol, Çimen; Humanities and Social Sciences; ERKOL, Çimen Günay
My Father’s House–The Idle Years is an autobiographical novel by Orhan Kemal, one of the giants of Turkish literature. The novel’s explicit focus is on a boy who grows up pursuing self-realization in a working-class atmosphere. The story takes place during a period of abrupt transformation when the Republic of Turkey, newly born out of the ashes of the collapsed Ottoman Empire, is adapting to oppressive conditions introduced by a burgeoning capitalism. Scholarship on Orhan Kemal has extensively uncovered and charted his socialist realism and unorthodox look at the history of Turkey, but it has not concerned itself enough with the issue of masculinity, which is an indisputable part of Kemal’s view of labour and political power. This paper is an initial attempt to approach Kemal’s autobiographical novels with theories of masculinity. I argue that My Father’s House–The Idle Years explores rites of passages into manhood in what can be referred to as a crisis of imperial loss: the boy grows in an attempt to restore his father’s victimized manhood, in a symbolic parallel to the transformation of the disintegrated Ottoman Empire into self-governed nation-states. Kemal handles the loss metaphorically, using the instability generated by the gender anxieties of a young boy who fails to be like his father to represent the instability generated by the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. I examine My Father’s House–The Idle Years as the Oedipalized story of post-Ottoman Turkey.
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Sleepwalking in İstanbul: a man in anguish in A. H. Tanpinar's A Mind at Peace
(Taylor & Francis, 2009) Günay-Erkol, Çimen; Humanities and Social Sciences; ERKOL, Çimen Günay
Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar's (1901-62) novels reflect the dichotomy within early twentieth-century Turkey: a nation maintaining past tradition yet concurrently embracing modernity. Tanpınar explores the Ottoman legacy of Turkish modernity and questions acute social and cultural change. Scholarly interest in this aspect of Tanpınar's novels has greatly eclipsed all other aspects, as most critics analyze Tanpınar's intentions primarily in light of his political ideologies or philosophical attachments. This article challenges Tanpınar's readers to consider him in a new light through an analysis of A Mind at Peace (2008), a multidimensional narrative that addresses an orphan boy's rites of passage, which lead to manhood, within a broad and perplexing story of continuity and change in Turkey. To understand the novel as a whole, this article asserts, one must first comprehend the protagonist's precarious masculinity and his gender anxieties.
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Turkish literature as world literature
(Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020-01-01) Alkan, B.; Günay-Erkol, Çimen; Humanities and Social Sciences; Alkan, B.; Günay-Erkol, Çimen; ERKOL, Çimen Günay
Essays covering a broad range of genres and ranging from the late Ottoman era to contemporary literature open the debate on the place of Turkish literature in the globalized literary world. Explorations of the multilingual cosmopolitanism of the Ottoman literary scene are complemented by examples of cross-generational intertextual encounters. The renowned poet Nâzim Hikmet is studied from a variety of angles, while contemporary and popular writers such as Orhan Pamuk and Elif Safak are contextualized. Turkish Literature as World Literature not only fills a significant lacuna in world literary studies but also draws a composite historical, political, and cultural portrait of Turkey in its relations with the broader world.
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World literature decentered: Beyond the "West" through Turkey, Mexico and Bengal
(Cambridge University Press, 2022-05) Günay-Erkol, Çimen; Humanities and Social Sciences; ERKOL, Çimen Günay
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