Negating the wall: an analysis of space, resistance, witnessing and writing in Turkish coup d'etat literature

Official URL: http://192.168.1.20/record=b1558728 (Table of Contents)

One of the most crucial topics of coup literature as a sub genre of Turkish literature is the matter of political representation. In this respect, literature with its capability to be the representation of a representation and being able to display historical events from different vantage points; becomes of uttermost importance. Specifically, autobiographical narratives have an informative characteristic with respect to the periods of coups. From this point, one can see that the retrospective analyses on these periods, firstly depict these periods as an ultimate state of exception, whilst portraying the subject who has been silenced and subjected to violence as devoid of agency and engulfed in desperation. Thus, it is clear that there is a necessity for a way of analysis that takes different positionalities into consideration and pave way for alternative representation and existence zones instead of totalizing, abstracting and silencing narratives through an inspection of the tension between ideological representation and literature and literature itself. This thesis will investigate literary examples, to first, locate the impact of spatical deprivation and confinement's affect on individuals' political agency. Moving from this point, the issues of conditions of bearing witness in prison setting and possibility of testimony will be discussed, only to reveal the political alternatives these texts signify. In the end, through the analysis of mentioned issues, the relationship between anthropological and autobiographical will be investigated and the possibility of writing as an alternative political project as well as bearing witness in an another way will be questioned.