M.A. Theses

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Relations and contraries in Charles Tomlinson's "The way of a world"
(Thesis (M.A.)- Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in Social Sciences, 1988., 1988.) Bulutsuz, Sema.; Taylan, Cem.
Wallace Stevens & Melih Cevdet Anday: the poetics of supreme fiction
(Thesis (M.A.)-Bogazici University. Graduate Institute of Social Sciences, 2005., 2005.) Batu, Pelin, 1978-; Sevgen, Cevza.
The distance between the physical and metaphysical, the real and unreal cannot be measured, but it is precisely a preoccupation with this distance that creates the poems and fictions of Stevens and Anday. The focus of my thesis is the journey the poets take into the grey zones of life and poetry. The relationship of the poet to the world around him, to death, change and pleasure are subject matters that both poets are preoccupied with, thereby raising the status of the poet to the "artificer of life." In their works, the multifaceted layers of reality and history are brought into question only to be debunked and replaced. My thesis is an attempt to explore this tendency towards destruction and recreation, the breaking down of boundaries to be replaced by new ones which in their turn will be broken down.
The city and catastrophe in 9/11 novels
(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in Social Sciences, 2022., 2022.) Memiş, Bahar.; Gumpert, Matthew.
In this thesis, I formulate ways of ethical responses to 9/11 as a catastrophe, problematizing how different strategies of ethical engagement change memory objects from an amalgamation of closed personal histories to relational and social constructs. Using Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007), I propose to analyze how different strategies of ethical engagement figure in the contemporary 9/11 novels. From the protagonist of My Year of Rest and Relaxation who already seeks a way out of connection with the rest of the outside of world with all its petty traumatic events and banalities; to the protagonists of Falling Man as immediate victims of a horrific event, the event par excellence; and the distant flaneur émigré of Open City who flattens all catastrophes into a general pattern of suffering in history is a line that meanders through the ethical implications of an engagement and disengagement with the city, its geography, and its habitants.
The cauldron of story : a theory of narrative
(Thesis (M.A.)-Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in Social Sciences, 2004., 2004.) Pavlik, Anthony John.; Sevgen, Cevza.
Stories are as old as the ability of human beings to communicate, and every culture both historically and geographically, appears to have its own body of narratives. Since the early Greeks, different theories of the nature of narrative have been advanced, but the general tenor of the arguments presented has usually been to view narrative as an inferior form of knowledge. This thesis aims to examine one theory of narrative that sets itself at odds with this position: Walter Fisher's "narrative paradigm". This theory seeks to re-unite mythos and logos through its notions of coherence and fidelity and the logic of good reasons, and, following an explication of the theory, it will be assessed through its application to a genre of literature, children's literature, in the form of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels.
Personal narratives of non-belonging
(Thesis (M.A.)-Bogazici University. Graduate Institute of Social Sciences, 2005., 2005.) Tuna, Özlem.; Irzık, Sibel,
This thesis is a comparative study of Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation in the context of their particular concern and problematization of the role of memory and language in the conception of self and reality. With the help of close textual analysis, the specific textual strategies of these two examples of immigrant autobiography make it possible to lay bare the taken for granted capacity of the two cultures between which these writers -who are children of immigrant parents- experience self. My focus of study is the manner in which these writers represent their own experience through their unique translation of the two cultures that they are a part of. The act of translation is the act of non-belonging. The difficult position that their simultaneous concern for the impossibility of representing these cultures in their entirety puts them paradoxically provides them with an ever-changing, multi-perspective vision that transcends all other forms of self dictated by both cultures. The capacity of autobiography to make the past and the present coexist is instrumental in enabling the autobiographers with the experience of a self across the boundaries of two cultures.
Narrating ravishment in early modern English literature
(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2022., 2022.) Kurtulan, Firdevs İdil.; Guagliardo, Ethan.
In early modern English, “ravishment” was an ambiguous term that could mean sexual violation, or abduction. This thesis moves from the ambiguity inherent in the early modern application of “ravishment” to look at narratives of ravishment in early modern English literature, namely, The Faerie Queene (1590) by Edmund Spenser, Thomas Middleton’s 1611 play The Lady’s Tragedy, and Shakespeare’s long poem Venus and Adonis (1593). These texts offer narratives of ravishment that diverge from the normative early modern narrative of ravishment where a male aggressor attempts to seduce a female, resorting to violence when rhetoric falls short of persuading her. In these texts, a female is impregnated by the sun, a dead female body is exhumed, and a female pursues a male through a rhetoric of seduction that becomes a form of ravishment in itself, respectively. Through these marginal narratives of ravishment, this thesis argues that narratives of ravishment in early modern English literature reveal the ways in which ravishment works in non normative, implicit ways. This thesis attempts to show how the forms of ravishment in these texts become instrumental to an interrogation of the notions of subject, agency, and ravishment itself, in addition to leading to a destabilization, or construction, of subjectivities.
How the world changes dystopias :|an ecocritical study of evolving climate fiction novels
(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in Social Sciences, 2022., 2022.) Erer, Eda Begüm.; Öğüt Yazıcıoğlu, Özlem.
There is a deep lack of attention to the discussions of climate change, both in general and in literature. The scientific data suggests that we are at a point of no return when with global warming and we will face great climate disasters in the near future. The Drowned World(1962) written by J. G. Ballard and New York 2140 (2017) written by Kim Stanley Robinson, as novels depicting similar drowned futures, use future narratives to criticize current Anthropocentric stances on climate change, and portray dystopic futures as warnings for the present reader. Reading the novels’ fluid connection to time and place through the lens of science fiction as a genre that blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction, this work seeks to trace the entanglements future climate narratives offer as alternatives to current dynamics of capitalism and ecological disaster. Both novels use the motif of the water as an actor that freely flows between boundaries and the different scales of time and disaster depictions show the ineffectiveness of Cartesian binaries against a fast changing climate. Science fiction elements blur the well-established time and space constraints of the Western narrative while questioning the human time and place on Earth. The use of posthuman ecocritical theories offer an alternative to present dichotomies between nature and culture. Science fiction works help to shape different ideologies that do not alienate the human from the the nature, which in turn may help the longevity and quality of human life on the planet.
Staging avatarization :|potentiality, simultaneity, and in-betweenness in contemporary theatre
(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in Social Sciences, 2022., 2022.) Aktan, Osman Can.; Fişek, Emine.
This thesis examines three American contemporary plays in the context of avatarization, which is characterized by three key features: potentiality, simultaneity, in-betweenness. Through the framework of these three pillars, it investigates the thematic and formal strategies followed in order to aptly represent the interwovenness of cyber and material spaces in the twenty-first century with a specific emphasis on how this intermingledness necessitates a cyberstage that can account for both of the spatialities involved. The three plays covered in the thesis are The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow (2003) by Rolin Jones, Marjorie Prime (2016) by Jordan Harrison, and The (Curious Case of the) Watson Intelligence (2014) by Madeleine George. All of these plays, while exploring new territories through virtuality, hearken back to the prominent themes of modern American drama such as the reconstruction of nuclear family or the search for domestic bliss. Instead of producing theatre in the cyber realm or entirely immersing the artform into virtuality, these plays construct a symbiotic domain where the material and cyber elements cohabit the stage. In doing so, they address the virtual issues posed by avatarization while also not sacrificing the tactility of the traditional theatre stage. Therefore, this thesis concludes that, the formal and thematic theatrical innovations mimicking the interwovenness of different spatialities in the online age fashion a fresh medium that can both account for the domestic themes of modern drama and tackle the novel dilemmas presented by the concept of avatarization.
Capacities and ill health :|Deleuzian ethics in the Flame Alphabet and Sıcak Kafa
(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2020., 2020.) Şen, Merve.; Öğüt Yazıcıoğlu, Özlem.
This thesis explores the possibilities that Deleuzian ethics offers—the investment in the body's capacities to enter affective and transformative relations, thus lead a response(able) life—as they become manifest in two contemporary novels revolving around language-related diseases: Ben Marcus' The Flame Alphabet (2012) and Afşin Kum's Sıcak Kafa (2016). In The Flame Alphabet, children's speech becomes poisonous for their parents, which causes pain and deformation in their bodies, whereas in Sıcak Kafa a memetic language disease—abuklama—causes people to talk in grammatically correct but semantically nonsensical ways. The diseases disrupt the flow of normalcy in life, thus revealing the suppressive power mechanisms in society, and transform not only the interrelations between the bodies, but also familial, social, and economic relations. In both novels, the employment of a subversive language as a disease signals an ongoing state of becoming, and opens unforeseen paths into diverse and mutually transformative relations to the world, and as such emerges as an enterprise of health. Both novels foreground language exchanges, and experiment with an alternative use of language beyond conventional forms of communication and mere representation. The disease provides a perspective on the sickness caused by the oppressive power regimes in society. These novels pave a fertile ground to discuss ethics, as they refuse the normative conceptions of health imposed on people and propose an understanding of health associated with the body’s capacity to act and affect as well as to respond and be affected.
Metafictional representations of trauma
(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2022., 2022.) Üçkardeşler, Uğur Yankı.; Kayışcı, Burcu.; Alkaç, Aylin.
This study explores the representation of trauma in three metafictional novels that deal with trauma in the last half century: Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969/2009), Chuck Palahniuk’s Survivor (1999/2000) and Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments (2019). While there is extensive research tracing the various themes in literary depictions of trauma, there is a gap in the studies of metafictional novels that fails to adequately address the connection between metafiction and representation of trauma in literary texts. Therefore, this study fills this gap in the existing scholarship with its focus on the metafictional representations of trauma. Building on the existing interdisciplinary approaches to trauma studies and metafiction, this M.A. thesis demonstrates how metafiction is an apt narrative strategy to convey the inherent resistance in traumatic experience to representation through the discourses of totalizing meta-narratives. By exposing how trauma manifests itself on the psyche of the victim, Slaughterhouse-Five, Survivor and The Testaments reveal that its representation also requires unconventional means of narration. All three novels not only self-reflexively question the limits of narrativity in representing trauma but also attempt at alternative narratives that are self-aware of the difficulty inherent in the task of representing trauma and actively include the reader in the creation of the testimonial text.
A threshold to an object oriented ontology :|metacognitive mystery tale as a hermeneutic pandemonium
(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in Social Sciences, 2022., 2022.) Doğalı, Canberk.; Gumpert, Matthew.
This thesis reads three novels of the genre called "metacognitive mystery tale". These novels are The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino, and The Serialist by David Gordon. This thesis aims to explore the hermeneutics of the genre and offer its distinguishing generic features through this investigation. It discusses the politics and ideology implied by the hermeneutics of the metacognitive mystery explored, and shows how the genre promotes and represents an emancipatory and anti-totalitarian hermeneutics. The thesis discusses and depicts that a totalitarian hermeneutics characteristic of detective fiction transforms everything into state apparatuses, depicting them as purely instrumental. Detective fiction does so by transforming things into fixed meanings that join each other and constitute and confirm a larger whole. Referring to a larger whole, things become symbols. And in detective fiction, they symbolize omniscience and omnipotence of the authority that translates them into clues -- things that point beyond themselves -- and then seals them together. In contrast, the hermeneutics of metacognitive mystery is liberating in that it frees things from the political and ideological mechanisms, in which detective fiction assumes and renders them to function. The thesis argues that metacognitive mystery achieves such a liberation by portraying things indeterminate. Following the imagery of instrumentality, if things are instruments, according to detective fiction, that join each other and thusly constitute a larger whole, metacognitive mystery sets them out of joint. This thesis investigates the ways in which metacognitive mystery does so. It argues that metacognitive mystery demonstrates that things resist being translated into clues, into sound and fixed meanings. I call the text that represents a lack of identification, an inability to define things, a hermeneutic pandemonium. And the thesis discusses that metacognitive mystery portrays a hermeneutic pandemonium. The liberation of things in metacognitive mystery parallels how the school of philosophy Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) democratizes them. Therefore, the thesis argues that the hermeneutic pandemonium is a threshold to OOO; and displays how the novels this thesis reads represent such a threshold.
The politics of nostalgia in Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Bacigalupi’s the Windup Girl
(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2020., 2020.) Kabak, Murat.; Bulamur, Ayşe Naz.
This study explores the representation of nostalgia in two dystopian novels, the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) and the American writer Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009). While there are major works tracing the themes of longing for home and belonging in contemporary fiction, there is no current study adequately addressing the connection between dystopian novel and nostalgia. Therefore, this study fills a gap in the existing scholarship by virtue of its focus on the dystopian novel. Building on the contemporary interdisciplinary approaches on nostalgia and dystopian tradition, this M.A. thesis investigates the political implications of yearning for the past. Through examining our ways of relating to the past, Oryx and Crake and The Windup Girl question two arguments that are central to utopian fiction: a return to nature argument and scientific and technological utopianism. Both novels not only problematize these contradictory possibilities, but they also propose and contest a third alternative: the possibility of a future that brings together human and non-human. I argue that Atwood and Bacigalupi’s novels are a meditation on utopian thought and a nuanced exploration of the experience of nostalgia.
Traumatic testimonies :|trauma, temporal hybridity, and language in The God of Small Things and Lolita
(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2019., 2019.) Oliveira, Cristiane Regina de.; Öğüt Yazıcıoğlu, Özlem.
Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955) and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997) narrate the traumatic effects of societal transgressions, namely pedophilia and incest. The authors distort literary notions of time and language by utilizing temporal hybridity and semiotic language in order to replicate the experience of abject trauma through fictional testimony. The novel's recurrence of certain words, events, and behaviors reinforce the repetitive nature and recall of trauma. The use of unusual and lyrical language, resulting in aesthetically beautiful novels, serve to ease both the characters and readers’ confrontation of the abject and forces them to reconsider societal ethics. Chapter 1 is an introduction to theoretical arguments on trauma, temporal hybridity, semiotics and the abject posited by Julia Kristeva, Cathy Caruth, Elizabeth Outka, and L. Chris Fox. Chapter 2 considers trauma and time, namely the characters' traumatic experiences and their impact on their perception of time and the novels' structure, which simulate the disorienting nature of a traumatic experience for the reader. Chapter 3 analyzes how trauma alters the characters' language, forcing them into a dialogue with the semiotic and the abject, and manipulating the reader into a complicity that challenges their morals. Chapter 4 offers a conclusion to the analyses elaborated in this work and argues that the authors' non-native command of English creates another dimension to the semiotic styles employed in elucidating trauma through fiction.
(Non-)spectacles of discipline :|institutions in the plays of Stoppard, Wesker, Pinter, and Nesin
(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2020., 2020.) Sönmez, Esra Misem.; Tekinay, Aslı.
“We are neither in the amphitheater nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine,” Foucault observes. Yet the stage remains steadily interested in the panoptic machine. Hubs of institutional power continue to concern playwrights, as discipline and surveillance are turned into spectacles on stage. This thesis studies Every Good Boy Deserves Favour by Tom Stoppard, Chips with Everything by Arnold Wesker, The Hothouse by Harold Pinter and Yaşar Ne Yaşar Ne Yaşamaz by Aziz Nesin—all plays that are centered around institutions of power and discipline, such as prisons, hospitals, schools and military complexes. In other words, these plays take place in, and are concerned with, institutions in their most Foucauldian incarnations. In this, they have to engage with a considerable question: How does one put the panoptic machine onto the stage, if the peculiar power of the machine lies in its invisibility, in its unspectacular nature, in the subtlety of its operation? In these four plays, we can mark common thematic concerns and dramatic strategies as they grapple with these questions. Thematically, language, visibility and sentiment constitute particularly productive venues of analysis in this examination. Formally, certain structural and tonal choices in the plays’ staging, including utilizations of music and humor, respond to the peculiarly unspectacular and subtle formulation of institutional power. This thesis studies representations of institutions in these works, to find how their dramatic strategies respond to the many contradictions of institutional power, in order to understand the representative limits and possibilities of theater.
The time element in "four quartes": |a Bergsonian approach
(Thesis (M.A.)- Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in Social Sciences, 1988., 1988.) Akyüz, Sevda.; Sevgen, Cevza.
HIV/AIDS in American theatre :|queerness, spatio-temporalities, and emancipation
(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2020., 2020.) Duman, Çağdaş Özerk.; Fişek, Emine.
This thesis examines American HIV/AIDS theater in the context of time and space. Drawing mainly from queer approaches to time and space, it explores the plays of Paula Vogel’s The Baltimore Waltz (1990), Cheryl L. West’s Before It Hits Home (1990), and Harry Kondoleon’s Zero Positive (1989), respectively. This study, first and foremost, aims to discover overlooked queer politics and spatio-temporal potentialities embedded in these plays. Torsten Graff suggests that queer theory, especially textually, neglects drama. It would not be wrong to say that, apart from some canonized plays, the potentials of HIV/AIDS theater have been overlooked by queer criticism. For that reason, this study aims to awaken these ostensibly dormant queer potentialities as well as to enhance their (re)visitability. Also catalyzed by Erving Goffman’s influential study on “Stigma,” and offering a concept of the “spatio-temporal stigma,” this study shows how this normative duress exacerbates the extant stigma on queer and black PLHIV. Ultimately, it also argues that theatre intervenes such oppressions, providing a liberating alternative spatio-temporality, and thus, heralding a resistant transformation.
The nineteenth-century politics of autoethnography and nationalism in the novels of Morier and Morgan
(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2020., 2020.) Öz, Özge.; Demirhan, Başak.
This study explores the representations of nationhood and national identity in the context of British and Ottoman Empires in two nineteenth century English novels, the English writer James Justinian Morier’s Ayesha, the Maid of Kars (1834) and the Anglo-Irish writer Lady Morgan’s Woman, or Ida of Athens (1809). Drawing from the theories of nationalism, colonialism, and orientalism as well as the literary theory of Frederic Jameson, this thesis aims to examine the political unconscious of these two novels emerging from their comparative attitude towards the nationhood of the British and Ottoman Empires. Being respectively related to the genres of travel writing and national tale, Morier and Morgan’s novels are identified as examples of nineteenth-century British autoethnographic literature. Accordingly, the representing of a colonized and Orientalized Other emerges as a vital means for arriving at an English autoethnography in both novels. Differentiating between their depictions of civic and ethnic nationalism in British and Ottoman contexts, I argue that the novels’ assignation of civic nationhood to the British Empire and ethnic nationhood to the Ottoman Empire bespeak their orientalist and colonialist political unconscious. Ultimately, I also find that the close study of nationality in both novels force the concept of national identity to emerge as a social construct as in the understanding of modernist nationalism, dependent on appropriation and performativity.
Staging the law :|verbatim theatre and access to justice
(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2019., 2019.) Kalkan Aydın, Nilhan.; Fişek, Emine.
This thesis suggests that the term “access to justice” should be interpreted as broadly as possible in order to produce a smooth, effective and fair form of justice. Specifically, I argue that verbatim theatre, besides its political and social role, might gain a legal role and become fundamental in victims’ quest for justice, as seen in three verbatim plays produced in the United Kingdom at the turn of the century: Richard Norton-Taylor’s The Colour of Justice, Tanika Gupta’s Gladiator Games, and Philip Ralph’s Deep Cut. With their lengthy trials, their failure to punish the perpetrators and their excessive media coverages, the murder cases of Stephen Lawrence Zahid Mubarek, and Cheryl James pose various questions about the fragility of the law. Aiming to show formal criminal systems’ failure to bring justice, the plays offer a more focused account of the events surrounding these three cases, and target a more ready-to-engage audience. As a result, the plays inspire an alternative justice-building process aimed at achieving restorative justice. Overall, the plays and the cases unveil the ambiguity of the relationship between the law and theatre in general and between restorative justice and verbatim theatre in particular.
Haunted :|tracing the figure of the ghost in drama
(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2019., 2019.) Kılınç, Burcu.; Tekinay, Aslı.
In the long interval between the beginnings of the drama and the contemporary stage, the ghost, with its fundamental liminality, remains one of the most ubiquitous and relevant supernatural figures that appear on theatrical space. As a quintessential figure of ‘return’, the ghost, within the plays it appears in, acts as a valid instrument to bring back to surface the unresolved tensions resulting from major social shifts or national cataclysms in order to acknowledge the existence of these tensions and perhaps, even resolve them. The present study explores the manifestations of the ghost on the theatrical stage of three distinct periods, Ancient Greek, Elizabethan/Jacobean England, and Contemporary (post-1960s) American. In the analysis of the selected plays, the figure of the ghost and its function is examined in relation to notions of justice, memory, legacy and identity. The aim of this comparative study is to trace the continuations and the alterations with respect to the conception and the function of the ghost through this historical trajectory, as the figure continues to probe and bring to surface unresolved tensions.
Man-animal-machine:|Exploring the posthuman life in Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Lady Chatterley’s Lover
(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2019., 2019.) Taşdemir, Tülay Pınar.; Gumpert, Matthew.
In this thesis, I aim to present a Deleuzean posthumanist reading of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In my research, I have mainly focused on how these two early 20th century novels disrupt the centrality of the human subject and explore the ways of alternative hybrid relationships formed through the human-animal-machine affiliations. This analysis has connected the posthumanist theory with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s writings in order to especially focus on the concepts of “becoming-animal” and “desiring-machines,” which I present as the preliminary posthumanist gestures taking place in Hardy and Lawrence’s novels. Subsequently, my interpretation sees both authors’ works as prefigurations of a posthumanist stance, rather than a nostalgic one, as is generally accepted.

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