The poetics and politics of the uncanny in Sevim Burak's works

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b1606909 (Table of Contents)

There is not much deep and overarching criticism about Sevim Burak though she is a very prominent author in Turkish literature. However, Sevim Burak discusses conflictual and critical subjects in detail with her short stories, plays and an uncompleted novel. Sevim Burak is an interesting author not only due to the controversial subjects she raises, but also with her different and non-traditional writing style which challenges the grammatical structure of the language and with the different constructions of the texts consisting of both written and visual materials. In this thesis, Sevim burak‟s works are interpreted through the uncanny. Departing from Freud‟s definition of the uncanny as “the return of the repressed”, the analysis of the works is developed benefiting from the frameworks offered by Lacan, Derrida, Dolar and Royle. The characters and spaces are analyzed through the themes of the double, being buried alive, the transgression of the boundary between life and death, and the return of the dead, which can be considered as the basic themes of the uncanny. In this thesis, based on the basic description of the uncanny as the return of the repressed, it is argued that the uncanny enables the expression of recurrent problems or conflicts of the characters about ethnicity, gender, and religious affiliations that are supposed to be repressed or kept hidden.