Type
Text
Type
Thesis
Advisor
Panou, Nikolaos | Tan, Eng Kiong | Harvey, Robert.
Date
2017-05-01
Keywords
Comparative literature -- Middle Eastern literature | Identity, Imagined communities, Modernization, Turkey, Turkish Literature, Westernization
Department
Department of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies
Language
en_US
Source
This work is sponsored by the Stony Brook University Graduate School in compliance with the requirements for completion of degree.
Identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/11401/77206
Publisher
The Graduate School, Stony Brook University: Stony Brook, NY.
Format
application/pdf
Abstract
Ever since its emergence in the nineteenth century, the Turkish novel served as a crucial space for imagining the new Ottoman and, later, national identity. However, more than the possibilities it presented in envisioning new definitions of Turkishness and homogenous communities, the novel also played an important role in the Westernization projects employed by the state in its attempts to insert itself in the grand narrative of European modernity. As such, the re-formulations of Turkishness undertaken by the novel had to be conducted on the unstable nexus of modernity, imposition, agency and local necessities. This thesis aims to look at how various tropes of Turkishness came to be defined through an engagement with discourses of power and Otherness as well as through the cultural memory of the past and dreams of authenticity. Through the themes of “comparison†, “conversion†and “hybridity†, the three novels under analysis are discussed primarily in terms of the ways in which they imagined alternative definitions of identity and modernity against articulations of Otherness, imposed not only by European discourses of power but also by the Ottoman/Turkish state itself. | 76 pages
Recommended Citation
Usta, Ceren, "Imagining Turkishness: Identity and Modernization in the Turkish Novel" (2017). Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions). 3037.
https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/stony-brook-theses-and-dissertations-collection/3037