Remembrance of Things Past in Modern Turkish Literature and Film

3 units

How does literature examine and enable us to understand issues and complex situations such as displacement, violence, human rights abuses? Asserting that literature provides unique insight into global events and personal histories, this course focuses on modern Turkish literature and film of the 20th and 21st centuries as it addresses both the local and the global. With roots in both the multi-ethnic and multi-lingual folk tradition and in the Western notion of progress, the literature of modern Turkey (1923- ) has from its inception been concerned with crisis, loss, Turkey's troubled past/s, and melancholy in the aftermath of the fall of the Ottoman Empire. In this course, we will bring to the fore the entanglement of literary, cultural, and political currents from the 1940s to the present. We will initially focus on Turkey in the eyes other cultures, considering its internationally recognized cultural scene, the politics of East and West divide, and current cosmopolitan moves. We will then move our gaze to the past and focus on the problems of modernity following the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic. We will engage with a wide selection of genres, from a novel to a memoir, short stories, poetry, and films that trace the effects of cultural and political turmoil, coups d'états, censorship, and human rights abuses in modern Turkey today. In a broad sense, we will consider how literature and film can create response to various social and political events, disrupting the status quo. Our discussion of the particular situation and themes of modern Turkish literature and film will be informed by readings in culture studies. The course will include texts by such writers as the Turkish novelist Yashar Kemal, best known for his Robin Hood tale, the novel Memed, My Hawk; the Nobel-prize winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk; the essayist and novelist Latife Tekin, who made her mark in the post 1980 Turkish and international literary scene by engaging magical realism in the vein of Gabriel Garcia Márquez; and the renowned novelist and human rights activist Aslı Erdogan, among others. Films to be considered are The Edge of Heaven by the Golden Globe winner Turkish-German director Fatih Akın, Distant by the Palme d'Or winner Nuri Bilge Ceylan; and Mustang, an internationally co-produced film by Turkish-French director Deniz Gamze Ergüven.