Translation and reception of feminist speculative fiction in Turkey: a multiple- foregrounding analysis

Abstract

This thesis studies a corpus of three works of feminist speculative fiction (Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood, Woman on the Edge of Time -Marge Piercy, Female Man - Joanna Russ) that distinguish themselves from traditional sci-fi books through their choice of themes and experimental narrative technique. The thesis examines the translation into Turkish and the reception of linguistic creations and neologisms (or nova in Darko Suvin’s terms) in this body of works. The main theoretical framework is Foregrounding Theory and its cognitive/empirical use by several literary scholars such as Willie van Peer (1986), David S. Miall & Don Kuiken (1994), Jameljan Frank Hakemulder (2004) who have examined how linguistic distortions and parallelisms affect readers’ responses to texts. Through a comparative reading test conducted on a group of Turkish and Englishspeaking readers, the thesis explores how the translation of feminist nova reshapes and differentiates target readers’ reception of the author’s and characters’ perspectives from that of source readers. Assigning a central place to foregrounding as a large-scale manipulation strategy in the source texts, and using Teun A. van Dijk’s method of discourse analysis, the thesis also examines feminist nova and their relationship to axiological perspectives of the novels under analysis. Briefly, it carries out a multiple-foregrounding analysis of the production, translation and reception of the feminist nova that serve as “ideologemes” (Julia Kristeva) in feminist speculative fiction.