Ph.D. Theses

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Three ways of looking at negative capability: William Carlos Williams, John Berryman, Mark Strand
(Thesis (Ph.D.)-Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in Social Sciences, 2014., 2014.) Yurdaün, Nejat Cihan.; Sevgen, Cevza.; Tekinay, Aslı.
Negative capability, coined by the romantic poet John Keats in early 19th Century, is a significant literary concept which defines the creative process and provides tentative guidelines determining the relation between a poet and his/her poems. Although the concept belongs to the romantic period, it has been appropriated and interpreted by many modern critics and poets. This study aims to show that during specific periods in their careers three 20th century American poets - William Carlos Williams, John Berryman and Mark Strand - present three different ways of looking at negative capability. In this context, terms, concepts and theories which are linked to negative capability such as subjectivity, mimesis, autobiographical writing and objectivity as well as imagism, deconstruction and post-structuralism are also questioned and examined. This dissertation is the product of close reading of selected poems by the three poets and it demonstrates that the concept of negative capability remains a valid approach to the analysis of poetry because it highlights certain limits of poetic expression and creativity.
The innocence of objects: commodification, collecting and fetishism in the Age of innocence and the Museum of innocence
(Thesis (Ph.D.)-Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in Social Sciences, 2015., 2015.) Yağcıoğlu, Hülya.; Öğüt Yazıcıoğlu, Özlem.; Gumpert, Matthew.
This dissertation focuses on the personal and social interactions with material world, as seen in the practices of commodification, collecting, and fetishism in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence and Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence. Although material objects have always been embedded in literary works, their significance is often subordinated to characters and events. In these novels human lives are closely intertwined with material objects, which transform and translate characters and events. These texts, I argue, challenge the supremacy of the subject and acknowledge the significance of the objects in their narratives. I also analyze the concept of innocence in the novels’ titles and its relation to the discourse of the object. I argue that Wharton and Pamuk’s object-oriented texts blur the categories of object and subject in the sense that the material objects are fetishized/idolized whereas human beings are objectified/reified. Understanding the ways in which these authors acknowledge the vital position of the object in fiction may alter the way we read literature.
The creation of the monstrous other through metamorphosis
(Thesis (Ph.D.)-Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in Social Sciences, 2012., 2012.) Batu, Pelin, 1978-; Sevgen, Cevza.
Every age and culture has created its own Others, some in the form of monsters who mirror not only our archetypal fears but our contemporary anxieties. Metamorphosis always involves otherizing and certain monsters are engendered through metamorphosis. It is these that I have chosen to work on in the light of mythography and contemporary literary theory. In this dissertation I analyze four narratives which focus on monstrous “others” and explore the relationship between these “others” and the societies that breed them. Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometeus and Kafka’s The Metamorphosis are read as the rewriting of mythic stories in which metamorphosis is brought about by the father. Stoker’s Dracula and Wilde’s A Picture of Dorian Gray on the other hand are two monstrous Others with protean genders echoing ancient myths of metamorphosing vampires and evil personified.|Keywords : metamorphosis, the Other, mythology, scapegoats, fathers and sons, evil, beauty.
Oğuz Atay's dialogue with the Western canon in The Disconnected
(Thesis (Ph.D.)-Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in Social Sciences, 2008., 2008.) Gürle, Fahrünnisa Meltem.; Ertuğrul, Suna.
Drawing centrally upon the work of the Russian critic Mihail Bakhtin, this study compares Oğuz Atay’s poetics with those of the canonic authors, and demonstrates how he copes with the authority of the past while building a new structure upon it. It also aims to show that the recognition of the impossibility of a language “untainted” by others and the awareness of the echoes from the past is central to The Disconnected, Atay’s masterpiece and most cherished novel. Bakhtinian concepts, such as dialogism, heteroglossia, polyphony and carnival, are employed in revealing the dialogue Atay establishes with his literary “fathers,” such as Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe, Dostoevsky, and Joyce. While one of the objectives of this thesis is to argue that Atay’s response to Turkey’s project of modernity is unique when compared to his contemporaries, its most important endeavour, however, remains to show that The Disconnected is a “world text” and Atay has a well-earned place among other modernist authors in that he draws upon the literary past and delivers it to the present in an enriched form. This comparative study, therefore, focuses not only on the similarities between Atay and other modernists, but also draws the line between him and the authors of the canon in that it shows that the journey Atay takes in The Disconnected is determined by a dialogue between not only the present and the past, but also the East and the West.
The witch : heroine or anti-heroine
(Thesis (Ph.D.) - Bogazici University. Institute of Social Sciences, 1995., 1995.) Gülçur, A. Lamia.; Doltaş, Dilek.
The image of the witch has always been an important one in the minds of men. The conception, which was an integral part of human bellief, later lost all its power and became the symbol of the out-group and was in the process of tIme solely assocIated with women. The witch became responsible for all the negative miracles and the wrongs that befell man. Still later the power invested in the ideation was questioned and philosophers as well as men of religion decided that none could be as powerful as God and therefore the power of the witch was only imaginary. These changes were reflected in the Iiterature. Women were first presented as forceful figures who could lead men to their destruction. Later this power was taken from them and they were depicted as peripheral figures whose sale function should be to please men. Ultimately women came to see themselves as secondary and lacking male figures whose aim should be to emulate men and prove their merit. It was later in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that women started searching for a different image for themselves. This image was the witch figure which had always been the symbol of power whether positive or negative. In the nineteenth century Mary Shelley created the monster Frankenstein in her capacity of witch. Charlotte Bronte explored the image but remained ambivalent in her choice between elf and goblin. In the twentieth century Elizabeth Bowen took a step further In this directIon by seeing the connection between the conception of woman and her affiliation with the witch figure. Jean Rhys further examined men's fear of this powerful figure and Fay Weldon took it to its culmination by advocating women to assume once more the role of the powerful witch figure.
Narratives of erotic desire and discourses on desire: from discord to concord
(Thesis (Ph.D.)-Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2008., 2008.) Alkaç, Aylin.; Baş, Işıl.
In this study narratives of erotic desire written in different periods of history are examined in terms of their relationship with the dominant discourses of desire of their time. The psychoanalytical approach to desire as theorized by Lacan is chosen to constitute the framework for the analysis of both the discourses and narratives of desire. It is argued that so long as desire was subservient to the dominant idealist philosophies until the mid-nineteenth century, narratives of desire had an antagonistic relationship with these discourses. However, when erotic desire became the center of attention and the repression over it began to be alleviated, the antagonistic attitude gave way to mutual dialogue and elaboration. In the first part of the study, in order to demonstrate the antagonism between the narratives and discourses of desire, Petronius’ Satyricon, Boccacio’s Decameron and Cleland’s Fanny Hill or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure or Fanny Hill are read with reference to the idealist philosophies of the Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, respectively. In the second part, how Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Ballard’s Crash and Acker’s Great Expectations and Don Quixote respond to and elaborate on the discourses of desire as advocated by Freud, Deleuze and Guattari, and French feminist critics Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva, respectively, are discussed. It has been shown that the writers discussed in both parts of the study used erotic desire as a narrative tool to comment on the prevalent discourse of their time.|Keywords: erotic desire, Lacanian psychoanalysis, desire in literature, desire in philosophy, desire in psychoanalysis, psychoanalytical criticism.
"A thing one knows not how to name:" the female grotesque in early modern English drama
(Thesis (Ph.D.)-Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in Social Sciences, 2008., 2008.) Seval, Ayşem.; Tekinay, Aslı.
Deriving from the ambivalence inherent in the concept of the grotesque, this dissertation aims to investigate how the female grotesque may offer possibilities for problematising stereotypical images of women as fools or the fickle incarnations of the devil even when it is employed in Tudor and Stuart Drama as crowd-pleasing and profit-increasing spectacle. Contrary to the arguments of some of the feminist critics, this study argues that the concept of the female grotesque may suggest cultural politics for women not just in the works of some twentieth-century female writers but even in a male-dominated genre such as the early modern English drama. After having discussed the different types of the grotesque and the social and historical background to the various female grotesque images such as the monster, the witch and the Amazon, the dissertation illustrates how, in Tudor and Stuart drama, these female grotesque images offer more than a simplified one-dimensional misogynist myth on women by exposing and questioning the complex web of power relations involved in their creation.
Nation-building and Gallipoli: representations in Turkish, Australian and New Zealand literatures
(Thesis (Ph.D.)-Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in Social Sciences, 2011., 2011.) Kirişci, Ayşe Candan.; Fortuny, Kim.
The battles of Gallipoli have a significant place in the recent history of Turkey, Australia and New Zealand. The war is considered to be a defining moment in the long process which shaped the development of their national identities. The experience has since been the subject of a large volume of writing ranging from military accounts to academic and popular histories, from personal narratives to works written in literary form. This dissertation focuses on the latter. One objective is to introduce a literary discussion in a field mostly examined from a historical point of view. Another is to bring forth a comparative dimension in the study of a topic generally considered from a single country perspective. This dissertation aims to discuss the literary representations of Gallipoli in these countries with special emphasis on their relation to their respective nation-building efforts. The texts that are dealt with have been selected based on two main criteria. The first concerns their place in the literary history of each country; the second is the time period in which they were composed and published. The study mainly concentrates on a number of examples from the first few decades following the Gallipoli battles; the outcome of the revival which marked the field from the late 1980s onwards has not been included in the discussion. Anthony D. Smith’s notion of the artist as a link between the cognitive dimension of a nationalist project and its expressive end has been taken as the main theoretical framework. The portrayal of the hero is taken here as a thematic strand which constitutes the main axis of comparison between the three cases studied. The characteristics attributed to the soldier on each side are given particular attention. Another theme that provides a ground for comparison is the ways in which the “enemy” are depicted in the works in question.
The intersection of class and religion in Victorian novels of the 1850s
(Thesis (Ph.D.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2022., 2022.) Kotan, İpek.; Demirhan, Başak.
In my dissertation, I focus on a set of English novels written in the 1850s in order to analyze how the fiction of the 1850s, the mid-Victorian period, engaged with social issues in ways that resembled as well as differed from the social problem novels of the previous decade. Consequently, I contend that in the 1850s, as social, economic, and political problems became less pressing and immediate, and the suffering of the population through hunger, disease and filth diminished in scale, religion reasserted itself as a mediating device in discourses surrounding social problems in the novels of this period. In each chapter, I focus on how specific religious affiliations, present as discursive frameworks in the novels, are a significant yet neglected aspect of the representation of class issues. Each novel is an example of a different religious denomination offering a frame or particular concepts to debate intricate class issues. Each novel has a particular form (gothic, industrial novel, historical novel, and working-class autobiography) which is substantially connected to the specific class issue in the novel. Arguing against the received “loss of faith” narrative in scholarship which, until recently, characterized the culture and literature of the Victorian period as one marked by religious doubt and gradual loss of faith, I demonstrate in reading these novels that tracing the intersections of class and religion yields a greater understanding of how social issues are represented in the novels of the 1850s.
Shakespeare and authority :|the intersection of theatre, locality and politics in Turkey
(Thesis (Ph.D.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2021., 2021.) Günekan, Melis.; Fişek Emine.
In this dissertation, I investigate the complex phenomenon of political Shakespeare adaptations in modern Turkish theatre and examine five distinct cases from independent theatre artists, Can Yücel’s Bahar Noktası (1980), Boğaziçi Gösteri Sanatları Topluluğu’s Kim Var Orada? (2015), Moda Sahnesi’s Hamlet (2013), Semaver Kumpanya’s Titus Andronicus: A Five Act Maganda Tragedy (2010), and Serdar Biliş and Sami Özbudak’s Romeo and Juliet (2016). Since the late twentieth century, William Shakespeare’s plays have become a common ground for addressing certain fundamental cultural and political transformations in Turkey, and adapting Shakespeare to the local context is often accompanied by a politically resistant desire to revisit the issues of ethnic difference and political otherness. My cases reveal that the practice of adaptation is carried out as a collaborative process, which embraces oftentimes neglected performance dynamics such as the historical/cultural background of the theatre site and concerns over Shakespeare’s politically loaded legacy. Theatre artists’ focus on the collaborative features of adaptation goes parallel to their major adaptation tendency: to unearth ethnic difference and/or political otherness in debating political fault lines in Turkey’s recent history. It also gives them room for untangling the issues of legitimacy, fidelity and cultural hegemony that have been central for Adaptation Studies. I argue that these theatre artists step outside the binary logic that surrounds the “original/adaptation” opposition since negotiating Shakespeare’s preserved, authorial status necessarily involves the questions of difference and identity that have marked modern Turkish history.
Samuel Beckett and communicational aesthetics: Between resonant worlds and material regimes
(Thesis (Ph.D.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2019., 2019.) Yaltır, Selvin.; Gumpert, Matthew.
While Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre manifests a wide array of communicational gestures, from voices and dialogues to more intricate webs of interrelation among bodies, affects, gestures, technological tools and voiceovers, communication has been a suspect term to define his work. This thesis examines Samuel Beckett’s work around an emergent idea of communication and works towards a definition of Beckettian aesthetics as “communicational.” It takes off from a nonstandard concept of communication that describes artistic creation, mainly derived from Deleuzean aesthetics, and proposes to analyze the various shifting conditions and material that make up Beckett's worlds of affection, perception, sensation and reflection. To that end, the chapters of this study discuss certain key texts and look at the ways in which diverse conditions, principles and topoi continually affect and resonate with each other across the oeuvre. By exploring the instances of a communicational gesture in the oeuvre, I seek to show that Beckett's language offers points of contact with affective, bodily, cognitive, social and political forms of expression. I suggest that considering the forms of sensibility and comprehensibility that Beckett's different levels of expression produce is significant to understanding his oeuvre-making. A novel understanding of communication in Beckett’s work contributes to the exploration of new forms of comprehensibility produced through implicit and provisional forms of knowledge across the oeuvre.
Future conceptions of language in contemporary science fiction novel
(Thesis (Ph.D.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2019., 2019.) Koparan, Can.; Öğüt Yazıcıoğlu, Özlem.
This thesis focuses on three contemporary science fiction novels, Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and China Miéville’s Embassytown, in which those who are deprived of self-determination and abandoned to precarity try to cope with the negative effects of biopolitics. Although biopolitics as the intersection of biology and politics claims to be concerned with the health of human population, it ends up marginalizing certain lives as disposable and threatening to the order. This contradiction is sustained by the historical distinction between political life (bios) and biological life (zoe). Language, being viewed as the apex of a uniquely human political existence, is the site on which bare life is objectified and dominated. Consequently, the science fiction of the twentieth century often viewed language as a prison-house for thought and a tool of social control. However, with the nascent posthuman understanding of human nature as a cultural construct, these novels show the confluence of language and embodiment as an effective means of creating political resistance. In Native Tongue (1984), women construct a language to name their experience and to transform an oppressive biopolitics. Similarly, Snow Crash (1992) treats multiplicity of languages as a means of resisting power and viral discourses. Embassytown (2011) imagines a future when human and non-human beings discover the potential of metaphoric language in realizing the arbitrariness of political constructs and utilize it to resist authority. Representing bare life as a discursive category, these novels ultimately complicate the logic of biopolitics, which rests on the foundational distinction of bios from zoe.
The lyric as the voice of pain:|Individual suffering in contemporary Anglo-American poetry
(Thesis (Ph.D.)-Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2019., 2019.) Sıkık, Bircan.; Gumpert, Matthew.; Tekinay, Aslı.
There is an emerging trend in contemporary studies on lyric poetry, namely the exploration of the social, moral, ethical, and worldly aspects of the lyric, a genre that has been viewed as the realm of the subjective. This tendency overlaps with recent interdisciplinary scholarship on the inexpressibility of private pain, which leads critics to search for alternative avenues for the representation of individual suffering. Drawing on contemporary lyric theory and studies on private pain, this dissertation explores how Ted Hughes in Prometheus On His Crag (1973), Kate Daniels in The Niobe Poems (1988), and Alice Oswald in Memorial: An Excavation of the Iliad (2011) utilize lyric devices to give voice to the body in pain. Employing the selected four lyric parameters (the focus on the subjective, lyric address, lyric temporality, and intense formal structuring), this study examines how these three lyric sequences revisit mythological bodies in pain both to uncover and to subvert ideologies regarding the suffocating experience of individual suffering. This dissertation seeks to place lyric theory in dialogue with recent scholarship on private pain so as to address a gap in existing criticism with regard to the privileged position of lyric poetry in terms of communicating private, somatic, and complex experiences. Thus, it aims to contribute to contemporary studies on lyric theory and the representation of individual suffering by analyzing the lyric strategies these three poets use to cast light on the dark geography of private pain.
Formations of hospitality in documentary theatre :|reverberations of mass media and human rights violations
(Thesis (Ph.D.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2021., 2021.) Atasoy, Merve.; Tekinay, Aslı.
This dissertation inquires how documentary theatre, which depends mostly on factual material and uses similar techniques as media, can subvert the hierarchies that often emerge in media’s representation of the Other. In contrast to media footages, which often assume the role of a host and decide who belongs to the ‘home’ or ‘the nation’, documentary theatre builds up ‘reciprocal relations of hospitality’ among the agents in theatre to undermine the sovereignty of a specific group. This reciprocal hospitality is enhanced through documentary plays’ disclosure of their mediational limits and of their position as constructs. The dissertation introduces four ways in which the reconfigurations of hospitality are manifested in documentary theatre: corporeal, commemorative, spectatorial and linguistic hospitality. It explores these categories with respect to Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight Los Angeles 1992, Genco Erkal’s Sivas 93, Zoe Lafferty, Paul Wood & Ruth Sherlock’s The Fear of Breathing and Erik Jensen & Jessica Blank’s Aftermath respectively. The dissertation suggests that the concepts of body, memory, gaze and language often include borders through which quiddities of familiarity and unfamiliarity are formed in documentary theatre. Thus, the plays analysed in the chapters all blur the borders of what is perceived and treated as home in their own ways. They delineate the ways individuals and communities are haunted by the unfamiliar or those who are not considered a part of the ‘home’. The dissertation aims to fill a gap in the current scholarship of documentary theatre with regard to the study of power relationships among the agents in theatre.
Rewriting Antigone, rethinking the political subject
(Thesis (Ph.D.)-Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2018., 2018.) Bodur, Ekin.; Gumpert, Matthew.
Taking Sophocles’ Antigone as its focal point, this dissertation aims to analyse how the tragedy is interpreted in modern philosophy and psychoanalytical theory. Through close reading of the works of G.W.F. Hegel, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, and Judith Butler, the dissertation addresses how Hegelian and post-Hegelian thought rewrites Antigone for modernity and how this affects the conceptualization of Antigone as a political subject in the modern adaptations of the play. The main argument is that philosophical works on Antigone not only read the play in a particular way, but in their interpretation, they also reproduce, and in this sense, rewrite the play to respond to the philosophical questions of their time. These rewritings of Antigone not only shape the modern reception of the play, but also raise theoretical issues that contribute to our understanding of the modern subject situated at the crossroads of ethics and politics. I argue that the Hegelian and Lacanian ethical readings of Antigone presuppose political subjecthood without openly acknowledging it, whereas feminist interpretations offered by Irigaray and Butler propose to read the play from the sphere of politics making space for Antigone to emerge as a political subject. Finally, I turn to theories of sovereignty to discuss the political implications of Antigone’s subjecthood. Consequently, through an analysis of the modern rewritings of Antigone, the dissertation intends to provide insight into the notion of the modern political subject.
If this is life: rethinking the modern subject through the aporia of biopolitics
(Thesis (Ph.D.)-Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in Social Sciences, 2016., 2016.) Aktokmakyan, Maral.; Öğüt Yazıcıoğlu, Özlem.
Drawing on the discussion of biopolitical modernity in the thoughts of Giorgio Agamben and Hannah Arendt, this thesis focuses on the biopoliticized life as manifested in the works of Zabel Esayan‘s Among the Ruins, Hagop Mntzuri‘s The Places Where I Have Been, William Faulkner‘s As I Lay Dying and Joseph Conrad‘s Heart of Darkness. While biopolitics, on a broader level, points to the disruption of the Aristotelian designation of the category of life as bios and zoe, it specifically comes to mean the management of lives by new power mechanisms in ways that deprive them of human agency. The main figures in all four works are examined primarily through their reduction to such a state of bodily existence or of objecthood. In the first two chapters, I deploy Agamben‘s discussion of Homo Sacer in order to present how Esayan and Mnzuri‘s works interrogate biopoliticized life as is the case with the Ottoman Armenians when their lives were radically stripped of a human quality. The next two chapters rework Arendt‘s notion of Animal Laborans in the stories of the Bundren family and of the pair Charles Marlow and Mr. Kurtz, and examine the glorification of labor, instead of action. The homo sacer and homo laborans figures in these works all embark on a journey which, in each specific case, fails to provide self-formation in the Hegelian sense. Their writing of their biopoliticized lives turns out to be an ―auto-bio-thanato-graphy,‖ out of which emerges a rather singular mode of subjecthood.
Authorial intrusion as a technique of self-conscious narration in the English novel
(Thesis (Ph.D.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in Social Sciences, 1991., 1991.) Ceylan, Fevziye Deniz (Tarba).; Sevgen, Cevza.
The use of authorial intrusion gives a self-conscious quality to the novel by underlining the distance between its fictional world and the real world from which the reader and the writer approach to that fiction. Eighteenth-century writers Sterne and Fielding have interrupted their narratives to comment on the action, characters, and the creative process of their novels. Thackeray and Trollope stand out with their use of the intrusive authorial narrator in the nineteenth century. A twentieth-century writer, John Fowles, comments extensively and systematically on the art of fiction writing as well as the role and functions of the writer by means of authorial intrusion in The French Lieutenant's Woman, which consequently appears as an example of metafiction.

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