İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı Bölümü / Department of English Language and Literature

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/11413/6786

Browse

Now showing 1 - 9 of 9

Open Access
An Evaluation of Liminality in Nadine Gordimer's July's People
(2020-03) KABAK, MURAT
Set 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.
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, AYŞEGÜL
Raja 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.
Open Access
Margaret Atwood’s “Oryx and Crake” as a Critique of Technological Utopianism
(2021) KABAK, MURAT
While there are major works tracing the themes of belonging and longing for home in contemporary fiction, there is no current study adequately addressing the connection between dystopian novel and nostalgia. This paper aims to illustrate how the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood uses nostalgia as a framework to level a critique against technological utopianism in her dystopian novel Oryx and Crake (2003). The first novel in Atwood’s “MaddAddam Trilogy” problematizes utopian thought by focusing on the tension between two utopian projects: the elimination of all suffering and the perfection of human beings by discarding their weaknesses. Despite the claims of scientific objectivity and environmentalism, the novel exposes the religious and human-centered origins of Crake’s technological utopian project. Atwood’s Oryx and Crake is an ambiguous work of science fiction that combines utopian and dystopian elements into its narrative to criticize utopian thought.
Open Access
On the Theme of Nostalgia in Paolo Bacigalupi’s Post-Apocalyptic Novel The Windup Girl
(2019) KABAK, MURAT
After the massive outbreaks of violence and catastrophes at the dawn of the twentieth century, experiences of dislocation and dissonance, as well as their reflection in the human psyche, nostalgia, captivated the interest of various disciplines from literary studies to politics. Although viewed through various lenses, nostalgia as a state of a wistful affection for the past still permeates the present discourses. These studies on nostalgia overlap with a rising trend in the Western literary canon, the surge of derivative forms of utopia. Building on the contemporary interdisciplinary approaches on nostalgia and dystopian tradition, this paper investigates the individual’s position in a dystopian setting with an emphasis on the experience of nostalgia in Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel The Windup Girl (2009). This article aims to investigate the role of nostalgia in a post-apocalyptic dystopian setting with a focus on various experiences of nostalgia. I argue that Bacigalupi’s novel is a nuanced exploration of the experience of nostalgia and a meditation on the connection between nostalgia and utopianism, due to its engagement with both individual and collective experiences of nostalgia.
Open Access
On the Utopian Possibility in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: A Lacanian Reading
(2021-05-31) KABAK, MURAT
Written in 1974, the American writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed revolves around the central character Shevek’s self-appointed mission to improve the relationship between two planets, Anarres and Urras, by breaking down the walls that are separating these ideological enemies. The novel, in that sense, can be read as one man’s search for an ideal state, rather than a description of a utopian/anti-utopian state. Literary scholars generally focus on various aspects of The Dispossessed in terms of its anarchist politics, ecological politics, and revolutionary politics. This article; however, aims to approach the novel from a Lacanian perspective by addressing the protagonist’s psyche and his relation to the socio-symbolic orders in the novel. By focusing on the characterization of the relations between the subject and the other in an anarchist (as well as a capitalist culture) in The Dispossessed, this article aims to analyze how the novel provides a path towards an ideal state.
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, AYŞEGÜL
This 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.
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 ELIZABETH
Tanguy 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.
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 ELIZABETH
This 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.
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, BÜŞRA
This 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.

Browse

Browsing İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı Bölümü / Department of English Language and Literature by Rights "info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess"