İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı Bölümü / Department of English Language and Literature
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Publication Open Access An Evaluation of Liminality in Nadine Gordimer's July's People(2020-03) KABAK, MURATSet during a civil war in the apartheid South Africa, Nadine Gordimer's July's People is centred around the relationship between the Smales family and their former servant July. As the communal ties disintegrate in the novel, three objects play a vital role in our understanding of the characters. For the purposes of this study, these symbols not only help us to reveal the nature of spatial-temporal dislocation but also reveal Gordimer's commentary on the apartheid South Africa. This study aims to contribute the existing scholarship by focusing on the liminal/in-between experience in July's People through analyzing the novel's preoccupation with subject-object relationship.Publication Open Access Creating the Nation on the Page: The Imagined Nationhood in Raja Rao’s Kanthapura(Namık Kemal Üniversitesi, Fen-Edebiyat Fakültesi Dekanlığı, 2021) TURAN, AYŞEGÜLRaja Rao’s Kanthapura (1938) focuses on the story of how Gandhian ideology reachesthe village of Kanthapura and changes the villagers’ lives drastically. Rao’s portrayalof national identity, by putting the village in the center, relies heavily on the use ofcenturies-old Indian culture and traditions in order to create a sense of shared historyand collective sense of belonging against British colonialism. In the novel, thevillagers re-discover their shared cultural and religious past in their attempt to find thestrength to fight against colonial domination and envision a new society. Thus, thenarrative’s imagining of the future society follows a past-oriented trajectory, namelycombining the past, present and future in the microcosmos of the village. I contendthat the temporal origin of the projected nationhood determines the limitations andpossibilities for the formation of the idea of nation and the future society.Publication Metadata only Maternal, Snake-Tailed Foundress Melusine a Transformative, Monstrously Transgressive Serpent Woman Under the Gaze(Indiana Univ Press, 2024) ALBAN, GILLIAN MARY ELIZABETHThis article evaluates the fascination of the protean serpent woman or siren Melusine, demonstrating the illustrious heritage of this hybrid foundress of the Lusignan dynasty. Her supernatural achievements are celebrated through history, literature, and culture, despite her betrayal by her weaker husband. As feminine nymph or maternal foundress, Melusine and her achievements serve as exemplary for powerful women. She represents woman castigated as abject, monstrous, and possessed of a terrifying vagina dentata from the voyeuristic male perspective, whose usurping gaze destroys her authority. She yet remains revered and desired for her creative life force and the phallic or hermaphroditic power represented by her tail. Whether as snake -tailed woman in Eden or connected with fertility goddesses or the Virgin Mary, the protean Melusine emerges as a magnetic, sovereign figure in her self-sufficient sexuality. Her transgressive prowess as a theriomorphic, transformative woman breaks through boundaries and overturns debilitating assumptions regarding her sex, blazoning her unruly force. Castigated as Other while revered as divine, her story rises above any slighting gaze to amaze us with her stunning tale or tail, evoking admiration despite all attempts to diminish her.Publication Open Access On the Verge of Collapse: Representation of British and Irish Identity in J.G. Farrell’s Troubles(Atatürk Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi, 2020) TURAN, AYŞEGÜLThis article aims to examine the juxtaposition of individual stories and collective history in J.G. Farrell’s Troubles to present a nuanced reading of identity politics in Ireland during the Irish War of Independence. Farrell’s the Lost Man Booker Prize recipient novel portrays one of the most tumultuous periods of Irish history (1919-1922) focusing on the daily lives of characters rather than the major political actors of the time. The novel, thus, prioritizes the stories and tribulations of ordinary people in a highly polarized society that incessantly urge individuals to define their alliances. This article contends that the novel’s representation of the period emphasizes the historical trauma as experienced by the characters rather than presenting a nostalgic glorification of the British or the Irish.Publication Open Access The Paradox of Thanatos: Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: From Self-Destruction to Self-Liberation by Tanguy Harma(Cankaya University, 2023) ALBAN, GILLIAN MARY ELIZABETHTanguy Harma’s monograph entitled The Paradox of Thanatos: Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: From Self-Destruction to Self-Liberation, with its fascinating cover illustration by Vasil Stanev, “2 Sugar Skulls,” presents an in-depth study of the Beat writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg as inheritors of the European Existentialist and the American Transcendentalist tradition. It elaborates these two writers’ struggle to achieve meaningful life in post-war America under hegemonic capitalism and consumerism, crushed beneath conformity and social control, as they struggle towards a more authentic self-expression and liberation beyond the restraints that curtail transcendence.Publication Metadata only The Petrifying, Apotropaic Gaze and Matrixial Vulva of Medusa, alongside Genital Display Figures(Indiana University Press, 2023) ALBAN, GILLIAN MARY ELIZABETHThis review of ten articles, books, and chapters on the mythic Medusa and genital display figures illustrates Medusa's petrifying and apotropaic gaze and her engulfing vulva, or eye blazoning her matrixial force, as her severed head demonstrates her abiding pro-creative, indomitable force. Through a history of women held under scrutiny while feared by patriarchy, with men projecting their own fear of castration onto them, the Medusa figure emerges as stun-ningly uncastrated, asserting her force and returning her stony gaze in the reflexive action pivotal to this myth. Objectified under the male gaze, her vulva faces the viewer, her inspirational force born through the birth of Pegasus even as she is crushed in rape and death. The mythic Medusa and vulva display women persistently retain their hold on the male unconscious in rising above castiga-tion, asserting their amazing procreative force over life and death, enabled through Medusa's stunning tale and transfixing gaze.Publication Restricted Reduced False Memory in the Second Language of Turkish-English Bilinguals(Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd., 2024) Sıtkı, Merve; Ikier, Simay; ŞENER, NİLÜFERIn the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm, studying a list of semantically related words leads to false memory for the critical non-studied word that is related to all the words in the study list. Previous studies questioning whether bilinguals are more prone to false memory in their first language (L1) or second language (L2) in the DRM paradigm revealed mixed results. The present study investigated the same question with Turkish-English bilinguals. The revised hierarchical model proposes that the link between the lexicon and the semantic system is weaker in L2 than in L1, suggesting that false memory in the DRM paradigm that relies on semantic relatedness would be higher in L1 than in L2. Furthermore, previous studies showed that L2 is more resistant to errors in decision-making when the two languages are dissimilar, but not when they are similar, and Turkish and English are historically distant and typologically dissimilar languages. We tested Turkish-English bilingual participants whose L1 is Turkish with Turkish and English DRM word lists that had similar prior norms for generating false recognition. In the recognition test, some of the studied items and the critical non-studied items were presented and participants identified the studied items. False recognition for the critical non-studied items was lower and correct recognition for studied items was higher in L2 than in L1. The results suggest that L2 is more resistant to false memory due to its weaker lexicon and semantic system associations, at least when the two languages spoken by the bilingual are dissimilar.Publication Restricted Representations of Istanbul at the Intersection of Modern Turkish Literature and World Literature(Springer, 2023) TURAN, AYŞEGÜLAs the cultural capital of both the Ottoman Empire and Republic of Turkey, Istanbul has assumed a central role in the literary imagination of the cultural legacy of the imperial past and the modern nation-state. When we consider Turkish literary history, construction of a national literary tradition reveals a close engagement with the West and Western modernity, often resulting in epistemological and ontological questions about the self searching for their place in the world. If Istanbul serves as the main ground for mapping out the anxieties about the national culture, it also provides the opportunity to reach beyond the national boundaries with its multi-layered and cosmopolitan past. In this paper, I contend that Istanbul, for several authors from Turkey, emerges as an important novelistic element and character so much so that it, on the one hand, enables them to discuss the possibilities and limits of the national literature and on the other hand becomes a venue for recognition as part of world literary studies. In this paper, I focus on three novels by three internationally acclaimed authors from Turkey, namely Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, Orhan Pamuk and Burhan Sonmez, so as to examine the spatial representation of Istanbul at the intersection of national and world literature. The novels under examination here, A Mind at Peace by Tanpinar (1949, 2008 English translation), The Black Book by Pamuk (1990, 1994;2006 English translation) and Istanbul Istanbul by Sonmez (2015, 2016 English translation) depict the individual's search for the self at a specific historical moment of modern Turkey, problematizing the past, present, and future of the nation-state.Item Restricted Studies in English: Proceedings from the 6th International IDEA Conference, 13-15 April 2011(İstanbul Kültür Üniversitesi, 2012) Kolektif; ed., Patrick HartPublication Open Access Thanatos in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Homer and Barker’s Achilles, Barnes and Saunders: Warding off Death before Release into the Unknown(Çankaya University, 2021) ALBAN, GILLIAN MARY ELIZABETHThis paper offers an existential approach to writers’ responses to death, evaluatingtheir different views regarding our ultimate destiny, Thanatos. It considers thedeliberations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the archetypal death-ponderer, and Homer’sAchilles, approaching our own time through contemporaries like Julian Barnes,George Saunders and Pat Barker. These writings spanning hundreds of yearsdemonstrate our desire to evade or control death, while anticipating ultimatejudgment for behaviour in this life, before loosening our attachment to life inaccepting our final fate. We watch Hamlet’s concern for his father’s ghost tortured inpurgatory and his wish for revenge, as it became surpassed by Hamlet’sinterrogations concerning his own mortality, still obsessed by death, to which forcehe finally surrenders. While Achilles had initially embraced a gloriously heroic,youthful death, Homer subsequently shows him mourning the loss of his life in Hades;Pat Barker shows Achilles as reconciled to death, even while attached to life inconsidering his child’s future. The contemporary George Saunders presents Lincoln’syoung son caught in a liminal bardo of the dead, who are trapped in attachment totheir mortal state, while Willie is enabled to transition to his final state of possiblejudgment and closure. Julian Barnes’ wish-fulfilment dream or desire of heaven offersthis ideal as a debased, corporeal paradise, leaving his character longing for meaning,even while trapped in the limitations of his own personality. Visions and dreams fromHomer and Shakespeare onwards offer cryptic clues regarding unknown futurestates. These literary reflections through disparate eras indicate the humanaspiration to evade death and whatever lies beyond it, while often positing a finalsurrender to death, alongside a wish for it to make sense of life through karmicresolution.Publication Metadata only "You Don't Know Who This Man Is": Hospitality and Trauma in Alexandra Wood's The Human Ear(Walter de Gruyter, 2021) ERDURUCAN, BÜŞRAThis paper explores the themes of hospitality and trauma in Alexandra Wood's The Human Ear (2015) by focusing on the modes of encounter with the Other in the play. As Lucy, a woman in her twenties, tries to come to terms with the death of her mother as a result of an unspecified bomb attack, she finds out that her estranged brother, Jason, killed himself. In the meantime, however, a man who claims to be her brother keeps turning up at her door, and through these encounters we can trace the possibilities and limits of hospitality. By referring to the theories of Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Sara Ahmed on home and hospitality, this paper argues that in The Human Ear, the redefinition of the relationship with the Other is represented as a means to come to terms with trauma as Lucy's process of welcoming the stranger is connected to her process of healing from trauma.