Literature and health: an essay critical and clinical on Vüs'at O. Bener's novels

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b1669277 (Table of Contents)

In this study, I argue that modernist author Vüs’at O. Bener’s novels Buzul Çağının Virüsü (1984) and Bay Muannit Sahtegi’nin Notları (1991) constitute productive cases for reflecting upon Gilles Deleuze’s proposition on literature being an enterprise of health. Approaching the (writing) subjects of these novels as models of Bener’s distinctive figuration of "sick" and "schizoid" subjects, I assert that these texts probe the question of subjectivity as a question of health, by challenging both in form and content the distinction between inner world and exterior world, individual concern and collective concern, private history and public history. The appearance of the act of writing in these novels as an impasse, but at the same time as a way-out, having not only personal but also political significations, I further argue, is a symptom of this problematization of subjectivity. I ultimately aim to show that Bener’s novels, which have been deemed to be pessimist, indeed open a discussion on a new possibility of life.