İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı Bölümü / Department of English Language and Literature
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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 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.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 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 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.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 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.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 On the Utopian Possibility in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: A Lacanian Reading(2021-05-31) KABAK, MURATWritten 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.Publication Open Access On the Theme of Nostalgia in Paolo Bacigalupi’s Post-Apocalyptic Novel The Windup Girl(2019) KABAK, MURATAfter 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.Publication Open Access Margaret Atwood’s “Oryx and Crake” as a Critique of Technological Utopianism(2021) KABAK, MURATWhile 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.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 Metadata only Elderly people's choice of media and their perceived state of loneliness(2016-01) Öngün, Erdem; GUDER, FERİDE ZEYNEP ; Demirağ, AşkınThis study aims at finding the relationship between elderly people's perceived state of loneliness and their choice of (old and/or new) media instruments. The sample of the study consists of randomly selected 300 elderly people over 60 who reside in rest homes in two different cities, Hatay and Istanbul in Turkey. Participants were given a questionnaire with three sections. The first section included questions related to the participants' demographic characteristics. Adapted from Russell's (1996) "Loneliness Scale (Version 3)", the second part was related to participants' perceived state of loneliness. Final section was about their choice of media and related details such as aim and time spent on them. Analyzed by statistical methods, study findings show that elderly people from two different social settings and with changing demographic features display differing degrees of loneliness with a significant relationship between the forms of media they used, their related choices, aims and perceived state of loneliness.Publication Metadata only Introducing innovation into an ESP program: Aviation English for cadets(2018) Kırkgöz, Yasemin; ER, MUSTAFAThe aim of English for Specific Teaching (ESP) in Turkish universities is to support the development of scientific literacy in learners' field of specialism in English. Implicit in this objective is to make the ESP curriculum tailor-made to meet the learners' specific needs. In this study, we describe evaluating the new Turkish Air Force Academy (TurAFA) curriculum, which has been in use for some time. TurAFA is unique in that it aims to train cadets to become combat pilots leading Turkish Air Force. After contextualizing our research, we provide an evaluation of an innovative "Aviation English for Cadets" (AEC) curriculum which has beendesigned to fulfill cadets' individual and institutional needs. AEC is based on a comprehensive needs analysis involving all stakeholders including the graduates, field experts, instructors and cadets. The most innovative aspect of the curriculum is the introduction of virtual aviation, a challenging innovation in the curriculum for cadets. We illustrate the course content with a simulated flight snapshot. Finally, we discuss the curriculum evaluation in relation to its professional relevance, use of technology, and challenges encountered in the curriculum development process. The study illustrates a localized practice; yet, we believe that it has implications for EAP/ESP practitioners and researchers globally.Publication Metadata only Publication Metadata only (Re) Reading Mishima Reading Sade: An Aesthetics of Transgressive Feminine Sexuality(2019-12) BAŞ, IŞIL; 207312A recurrent internovelistic theme in the work of Japanese writer Yukio Mishima is the threat of insidious, emasculating feminine sexuality and cruelty set against an idealized and purified femininity.However, in the play Madame de Sade (1965) Mishima seems to reveal a much more complex vision of feminine agency and sexuality from the fictional perspective of real women characters in Marquis de Sade's life. This paper will reread Mishima's play in the context of Simone de Beavoir's Must We Burn Sade and Angela Carter's The Sadeian Women both of which refuse to see in Sade a misogynistic, animalistic and banal cruelty.Publication Metadata only The Sense of Belonging and Unbelonging in Halide Edip’s Proto-Feminist Works in English(2019-06) BAŞ, IŞIL; 207312Europe is being defined in new ways. On the first hand there is the issue of postsocialist countries in central and eastern Europe. Secondly due to high level of migrations now Europe is more multicultural than ever. Hence any European perspective necessarily involves the recognition of internal gender regimes of countries and cultures that comprise it. It also goes without saying that women's movements are "embedded in particular histories and geographies" hence any gender agenda should take into account the diversities. My paper will concentrate on Turkey's specific place in Europe and our experience in the feminist movement and women's studies both of which are inextricably linked to our sense of belonging and unbelonging to the European culture. To that end I will be analyzing Halide Edip Adivar's works many of which were published in English due to her exile upon the fall off between her and Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey over her views on authoritarian regimes. Her autobiographies, articles and novels display the sense of belonging and unbelonging of this exceptional woman who was the first graduate of American Academy of girls in Istanbul, the first woman in 1928 to lecture on politics at the Williamstown Political Institute, lecturer at Colombia University, founder of the very first English Language and Literature department in Turkey, writer of the first English Literature survey in 3 volumes as well as being a proto-feminist, nationalist and sergeant during the years of the War of Independence.Publication Metadata only Bone and Flesh, Death and Life: Representing the Human Body in Anil's Ghost(2019-04) TURAN, AYŞEGÜL; 273470Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost portrays the events evolving around Anil Tissera, a forensic anthropologist who, after living in England and the US for fifteen years, returns to her homeland Sri Lanka as part of an international human rights group to help with the investigation of mass murders. Anil and Sarath, a local archaeologist, are to identify the victims of unknown extrajudicial executions, which proves difficult and dangerous in the volatile and violent atmosphere of Sri Lanka as represented by the discovery of a recently buried skeleton in an ancient burial site controlled by the army. In this paper, I will focus on the depictions of the body, specifically those of skeletons and bones, to examine the novel’s metonymic representation of the individual and collective memory. As the violence of civil war becomes etched onto human bodies, bones start to serve as a repository of cultural memory after death. In the novel, “Sailor,” the recently buried skeleton, stands for all those bodies that have disappeared under not-so-mysterious circumstances. In other words, the attempt to give the Sailor a name and a face becomes emblematic of the desire to acknowledge the loss and suffering as well as honoring the dead. I contend that in the novel, the conscious effort to strip the bodies of their identity and to anonymize them does not lead to their ultimate erasure from history; on the contrary they, through the lifeless bones, draw attention to this attempt and hence become an essential part of cultural memory.