Turkish Readers Research Articles

A Country of White Lilies: Inter-Imperial Nation-Making and Development from the Russian Empire’s Periphery to Post-Ottoman Turkey

AbstractIn this article, we investigate the reasons behind the puzzling enthusiastic reception of a book about Finland’s national development by Turkish nationalist intellectuals in the early Republic of Turkey. Published in Turkish in 1928, the developmental model laid out in Petrov’s The Country of White Lilies resonated with the Turkish intelligentsia and has remained a popular book in Turkey throughout the twentieth century, and even today. First, we compare the fictionalized developmental model presented by Petrov in his book with Finnish development under the Russian Empire, before its independence in 1917. Second, we show that this reception was largely based on a comparison of Turkey and Finland’s geopolitical positions in global imperial politics, and a constructed racial affinity between the two nations in the minds of Turkish readers. Third, we argue that this national developmental model served three ideological purposes; distancing the Turkish Republic from the Ottoman Empire, showing the developmental capacity of nations outside the linear and paternalistic developmental model proposed by Western European empires, and last, presenting a model that glosses over Ottoman-Turkish state violence and ethnic cleansing, as well as democratic processes, as irrelevant to considerations of progress and development. Finally, we discuss the implications of our study for re-evaluating the sociological literature on nation formation, largely taking its “model cases” (Krause 2021) from the Western European experience, through a more encompassing inter-imperial approach (Doyle 2014).

Feminist Discourse and Its Translation: Macro- Strategies in Fihrist’s Feminist Utopias Series

Starting from the late 18th century, the feminist movement has evolved throughout the world, and literature has a crucial role in its development. Not only the feminist literary works or their translations but also research based on these works help women raise their voices in order to stand against inequalities arising from their gender. With a broad perspective, in this study, feminist translation is not just regarded as a struggle against domination, but it is rethought through feminist strategies and practices applied by the translators and the other agents involved in the translation process. In 2021, the publisher, Fihrist published a series under the title of “Feminist Utopias”. In this series, there are five late 19th-century utopias, which highlight the temporal gap between the source texts and their translation. Within this regard, this study aims to analyze feminist translation macro- strategies in these utopias within Luise von Flotow’s framework. The results of the analysis have shown that Fihrist’s launch of this series aims to introduce Western feminist utopias which present new dimensions by envisioning alternative societies that challenge traditional gender roles and power dynamics to the Turkish reader. The publisher's intention has been strengthened through the strategies employed by the translators, particularly the utilization of footnotes, addressing sexist concepts, and highlighting original feminist discourse.

Mediatorship in the clash of hegemonic and counter publics

Abstract This study discusses how the publication of Alice Oseman’s translation of the Heartstopper (Kalp Çarpıntısı) series in Turkey became a case of multiple mediatorship, from the stigmatization of the series as “propaganda of heresy” and the official restrictions of its sales to the support for its dissemination among the target audience. Closely relating to the mediation processes that turn sanctions into statements against the LGBTQ+ community or springboards for solidarity in support of equality and inclusion, the concept of multiple mediatorship embodies mediators or agents acting for or against the dissemination of the series among Turkish readers. In that vein, this study offers a nuanced understanding of how mediation cannot simply be deemed a collaborative act enabled by alliance, but, rather, of how it involves a clash of multiple mediators who are in conflict in the public sphere.

The Contribution of Publisher and Translator Strategies to the Symbolic Capital: A Case Study on Three Turkish Translations of The Turn of the Screw

Henry James (1843-1916), one of the leading figures of the Modernist movement and one of the most important authors of American literature, quickly gained great fame with his works published in the early 20th century. Using the stream of consciousness technique, the continuous flow of thoughts and feelings through words, the author enables his readers to make a deep journey into the inner worlds of the characters in his works. James also used this technique, generally characterized by monologues and thick descriptions, in The Turn of the Screw (1898). The aim of this study, examining the three Turkish translations of James’ work by Necla Aytür, Tamer Çetin and Ezgi Uslu published with the title Yürek Burgusu, is to demonstrate to what extent the strategies of the publishing houses, Türkiye İş Bankası Cultural Publications, Cem Publishing House and Ren Books, respectively, have contributed to the symbolic capital of the source text in the target culture. The strategies of the relevant publishing houses will be examined through the analysis of paratextual elements proposed by Gérard Genette (1997). In the study, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus (1977, 1990) and capital (1986, 1998) will also be used to discuss the policies and strategies of the publishers as well as the academic and professional trajectories of the translators and their translational dispositions and strategies. Within this framework, it can be argued that compared to the other two publishers, Türkiye İş Bankası Cultural Publications, which has stronger economic and symbolic capital and has made significant contributions to the target language, culture and history, has reinforced the position and symbolic capital of the work in the target culture and in the eyes of Turkish readers to a greater extent through its publishing and translation policy.

Resume of some issues of the poetics of the Turkish postmodernist novel

In the article it is discussed postmodernism as a cultural-aesthetic style in Turkish literature, which was discussed relatively late, in the 80s of the 20th century. At first it was talked about as a novelty in Turkish literature and it was also called late avant-gardism. For Turkish readers accustomed to classical writing, the postmodernist work, characterized by a decentralized and fragmented structure, turned out to be difficult to understand, but with the passage of time, the reader's attitude also changed. The Turkish novel was created during the Tanzimat period under the influence of the European, in particular, the French novel. Obviously, the understanding of the novel of this period in Turkish literature has some shortcomings in terms of technique, content and style. However, it can be said that it was these first attempts that laid the foundation for the establishment of a true novel genre in Turkish literature. The Turkish novel reached its true identity, the perfection of the novel technique during the literature of Serveti Fünun. In the years 1900-2000, there is a change of artistic values in the Turkish (novel). Since the 80s of the twentieth century, the Turkish postmodernist novel has become part of the world postmodernist literature. In this way, the research of the Turkish postmodernist novel, its universal and specific features in the global literary context becomes relevant.

‘A strange country’: representations of the nascent state of Israel in the Turkish press

ABSTRACT This article analyses a series of 14 articles, published in the widespread daily Turkish newspaper Yeni Sabah in June 1949 under the title ‘A Strange Country: Yeni Sabah’s Correspondent Mehmet Ataker reports from Israel’. It shows that while Turkey was the first Muslim state to have recognised Israel, Yeni Sabah adopted a clear anti-Israel stance, transmitting the Palestinian narrative on the 1948 war to its Turkish readers and attempting to delegitimize Israel by questioning the idea of Jewish nationalism and using symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism to deride Israelis and Jews.

Çeviri eleştirisine sosyolojik gözle bakmak: Karanlığın Sol Eli

Bu çalışmada, Ursula K. Le Guin’in 1969 yılında yayımlanan The Left Hand of Darkness romanının Türkçe çevirisi, Antoine Berman’ın çeviri eleştirisi modeli çerçevesinde, Bourdieucü sosyolojik yaklaşımla ele alınmıştır. Eser, Ümit Altuğ tarafından çevrilmiş ve 1993 yılında Karanlığın Sol Eli başlığı ile Ayrıntı Yayınları tarafından yayımlanmıştır. Çalışmada bu eserin seçilmesinin sebebi, feminist bilimkurgunun ilk örneklerinden olması ve konusuyla dili bakımından Türkçeye çevrilmesinde olası zorlukların bulunmasıdır. Toplumdaki toplumsal cinsiyet algısı dil aracılığıyla kurulur ve yeniden üretilir. Bunun en önemli örneklerinden biri de İngilizcede olduğu gibi bazı dillerde cinsiyetli adılların (he/she/it) bulunmasıdır. Sözkonusu bilimkurgu eseri cinsiyetsiz (androjen) insanların yaşadığı bir gezegende geçmekte ve erkek bir gözlemci tarafından aktarılmaktadır. Toplumsal cinsiyet ve dilin kesişme noktasındaki sorun da burada ortaya çıkar, çünkü Türkçede cinsiyetli adıl yoktur. Bu yüzden eseri Türkçesinden okuyanlar bu eser üzerinden gerçekleştirilen tartışmaları takip edememektedirler. Yayınevi veya çevirmen, dipnot veya önsöz gibi üstmetinsel müdahalelerde bulunmadığı için, erek metinde bu mesele yeterince ön plana çıkamamıştır. Dolayısıyla Berman’ın modeli uyarınca eserin yeniden çevirisinin yapılmasının ve bu çevirinin eserin çok katmanlı yapısı ve yazarın kendine özgü dil ve dünyası göz önünde bulundurularak yapılması gerektiği ortaya çıkmıştır.

Jorge Luis Borges in Turkish: Magical Realism in a Politically-and-Poetically Motivated Literary Field

Jorge Luis Borges in Turkish: Magical Realism in a Politically-and-Poetically Motivated Literary Field Ceyda Elgül This article traces the multiple encounters of Jorge Luis Borges with Turkish readers in light of the publishing policies and social dynamics surrounding the region in the second half of the twentieth century. Although the first translation of his work into Turkish appeared as early as 1955, Borges became popular in Turkey during the 1980s, concurrently with many other Latin American authors, some of whom were participants in the magical realist literary stream. The article mainly investigates the positions of the Turkish translations of Borges and other Latin American writers within the 1980s literary repertoire that reflects the state of cultural production following the Turkish coup d’état in 1980. The revival of the fantastic genre by local writers during the same time period also illuminates the topic of Latin American magical realism in Turkish. Therefore, this article examines the activities of literary agents, namely the translators, editors, and critics, who acted as representatives of Borges and other Latin American authors in Turkey, in addition to mentioning the local representatives of magical realism. In order to present a holistic view, before embarking on this 1980s literary network, the study explores the initial translation of Borges into Turkish, published in a literary review in the 1950s, which seems to suggest an alternative context for the writer that carries traces of the golden age of the short story in Turkey. It concludes with a discussion of the state of Borges and Latin American literature in Turkish after the 1980s, with references to published translations and articles by local critics that delved into these particular subjects. [End Page 53] Jorge Luis Borges’s initial and subsequent appearances in Turkish could be regarded as extensions of the journey of his literature in Europe. By the 1950s, French publisher Roger Caillois had introduced several of Borges’s works into French. In particular, the volumes Ficciones (Gallimard, 1951) and Labyrinthes (Gallimard, 1953) initiated the journey of Borges in Europe. In 1959, his works appeared in Italian (L’Aleph, Feltrinelli, 1959) and German (Labyrinthe, Carl Hanser Verlag, 1959) (Irby and Yates); and in 1961, he received the Prix Formentor, followed by the publication of his two major English-language translations, Ficciones (Grove Press, 1962) and Labyrinths (New Directions, 1962). The 1960s witnessed Borges’s first translations into many other European languages, such as Swedish (Biblioteket I Babel, 1963), Dutch (De Aleph en andere verhalen, 1964), Norwegian (Labyrinter, 1964), Portuguese (História universal da infâmia, 1964), Polish (Fickje, 1972), Greek (Anthologia, 1979), and Czech (Brodiova zpráva, 1979). Following the 1980s, the rest of the world encountered Borges through translations into Slovak (1980), Polish (1980), Albanian (1981), Hebrew (1982), Catalan (1983), Danish (1983), Romanian (1983), Hungarian (1984), Russian (1984), Slovenian (1984), Estonian (1987), Arabic (1987), and Bulgarian (1989).1 The above list refers to the first translations of Borges’s works that appeared in book form. In many of these regions, translations of his poems, stories, and/or essays had been published in periodicals before the appearance of these translated books.2 This was also the case in Turkey. In 1955, a translation of the short story “La escritura del dios” appeared in the journal Yenilik, under the Turkish title “Tanrının Yazdığı Yazı” (The Writing of the God). The story was originally published in the Argentine paper Sur, then included in the short story collection El Aleph in 1949. It might be surprising to see Borges in a Turkish literary journal at a time when he was barely recognized in Europe and North America. However, the literary setting of 1950s Turkey may account for this early encounter between an Argentine writer and Turkish readers. The 1950s cannot be examined separately from Turkey’s transition to a multi-party regime, after which the country witnessed the implementation of a liberal democracy model that exhibited close ties with the USA. The economic and political developments of this era require more detailed elaboration that would exceed the scope of this article. However, the liberal environment promised by the political diversification of the 1950s can still be related to Borges’s...

Towards an understanding of post-translation studies: A comparative analysis of cultural transfer in the rewritings of popular literature

With the technological developments and the globalization process especially after the 1980s, translations have gained new functions as ‘cultural products’ that are consumed by the people in various parts of the world. Today, works of popular literature can reach people from diverse cultures in a very short time through translation. These new conditions require the evaluation of the socio-cultural functions of these translations with a new perspective in the field of translation studies. In order to analyze these functions of the translated texts, Edwin Gentzler (2017) proposes a framework with the name ‘post-translation studies’. Within this framework, Gentzler (2017) draws attention to focus on translation as a form of rewriting and to investigate pre-translation and post-translation conditions in the receiving societies. Gentzler’s (2017) approach emphasizes to analyze the translations in their social contexts and to trace the socio-cultural changes that take place in these societies after the translations are put into circulation. As part of ‘post-translation studies’, this article aims to investigate how Turkish translations of a representative of American popular literature presented American cultural elements in the 1980s and in the 2010s as forms of different rewritings. To this end, Turkish translation of Stephen King’s IT in 1987 and its retranslation by the same publisher in 2015 were compared in terms of the representation of the culture specific items. The analyses were based on Pavlovic and Poslek’s (1998) categorization of the culture specific items and Aixela’s (1996) categories of the translation strategies, which were grouped as being source-oriented and target-oriented on the macro level. Evaluating the results in relation to the socio-cultural context of the receiving society in the 1980s and the cultural changes that have occurred until the retranslation was published, it was found out that American cultural items in the source text were predominantly translated with target-oriented strategies in the initial translation in 1987 and they were mostly translated with source-oriented strategies in the retranslation in 2015. It was also observed that the familiarity of the items belonging to American culture highly increased for the Turkish readers in the 28-year period as a result of the influence of the source culture.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky in Turkey: History of Translations

The article is devoted to the review of the history of translations of Fyodor Dostoevsky into Turkish. Currently, Dostoevsky is one of the most popular foreign writers in Turkey, and according to the Turkish book market, one of the most purchased authors. By decision of the Ministry of Public Education, since 2004, the works of the Russian classic have been included in the recommendatory part of the school curriculum, so it is difficult to find a person inTurkey who would not read Dostoevsky. The history of Dostoevsky’s translations into Turkish evolved in a special way: back in the late 19th - early 20th century there were none, since the Department of Russian Language and Literature in Turkey first opened in 1935, but the first translations appeared only in the 1920s and performed from French. However, subsequently the popularity of the writer grew so much that absolutely all of his works were translated into Turkish, and some even several times. Classical Russian literature had a special influence on Turkish literature of the 20th century, and Dostoevsky’s works are the most important literary basis for their own work for many Turkish writers. For example, the recently translated into Russian novel “The Idiot” by the American writer of Turkish origin Elif Batuman, who was born and raised in the United States, as well as the novel by the young prose writer Burhan Sonmez “Istanbul. Istanbul”. Despite the late appearance of Dostoevsky’s works on the Turkish book market and late acquaintance with the Turkish reader, Dostoevsky became one of the most popular and beloved Russian writers among Turks of almost all ages (which is confirmed by the publication of Dostoevsky’s works in an adapted form for children). The authors of the article analyzed the history of translations of Dostoevsky’s novels into Turkish and came to the conclusion that the appearance of a large number of translations is explained not only by the great popularity of the Russian language and culture in modern Turkey, and not only by the cinematic popularity of Dostoevsky all over the world, but also by a high reader demand for his texts, since Dostoevsky’s works meet the cultural and moral needs of modern Turkish society.

JOSEPH BOULOGNE, THE CHEVALIER DE ST GEORGE: MUCH FORGOTTEN BLACK COMPOSER OF THE 18TH CENTURY FRANCE

Joseph Boulogne, the Chevalier de St George is one of the interesting and fascinating characters of the 18th century France. He was one of the first black musicians of his time. He was a master of fencing, a classical music composer, personal music teacher to Marie Antoinette, an active abolitionist and a colonel to the Legion of Saint Georges, the first black regiment formed in France and Europe. The aim of this research to introduce this mostly forgotten and underestimated violinist and composer to the Turkish reader. Among the research done the course of this work, very little information was found in Turkish about this black composer. To be precise a badly translated version of what is found on Wikipedia. It is hoped that this black composer will be introduced to the Turkish music scene and his works will be of interest to the readers.

A Look at Yuri Bondarev in Turkey from Past to Present

Yuri Vasilyevich Bondarev is one of the well-known names of 20th century Russian literature, and he is one Russian writer familiar to Turkish readers. A successful author of war prose, Bondarev attracted the attention of the Turkish audience with a wide range of literary works which includes novels, novellas, short stories, poems, articles, essays, interviews, etc. In this respect, the years in which he produced writings on the universal theme of war have an important place in Turkish politics. Bondarev began to be published in Turkey during the politization process following the military coup (1980) and he continued to be present in Turkey until the day he died. Especially in the 80’s when he was adopted as a war prose writer he was a guide for left-wing people in the struggle after the events of September 12. It is worth noting that the recent significant increase of interest in Bondarev’s work among Turkish linguists and philologists indicates that he is popular with the Turkish reader no less than the recognized classics of Russian literature. In this article, Bondarev’s position in Turkey from past to present will be analyzed in view of the studies on him in Turkish press and literature, and it will be emphasized that the author engrossed the Turkish reader with his artistic expertise and the ideology relayed through his works.

José Saramago’s crossover picturebooks and their reception in Turkish

: The article presents a case study of three picturebooks –A Maior Flor do Mundo(2001), El Silencio del Agua(2011), and O Lagarto(2016) –by Portuguese author José Saramago in Turkish translation. It first looks at theimplied readers of the books through paratextual analysis, and then assesses the influence of paratextual choices on the responses of real Turkish readers using data culled from social media, online reader platforms and a specially constructed reader group session. The findings demonstrate that the implied crossover reader has disappeared in Turkish, which causes these works to be received as children’s storybooks. This in turn influences real readers’ reactions, depending on who they have bought the books for –children or themselves.

Examining readers’ perceptions of translations: The case of Stephen King’s works in Turkish

Known as the master of horror with more than sixty novels, Stephen King’s works have been translated into Turkish since 1970’s and published mainly by Altın Kitaplar Publishing House. His works, frequently being among the best-sellers, have been retranslated into Turkish and reprinted countlessly with updated covers and labels such as “uncensored complete book” or “complete book” in the last years. Such instances mostly cause Turkish readers to question various publishing practices of the publisher from diverse perspectives and discuss particularly the concepts of “retranslation”, “reprint”, “revision”, “censorship” and “cutting”. This study aims to examine readers’ reception and perceptions of above-referred concepts made itself evident lately regarding Turkish translations of King’s works. In this sense, it benefits from online data such as readers’ blogs and discussion forums in which they share a plethora of comments and make detailed discussions by tracing the links among King’s translations. The study concludes that readers largely face with a confusion as a result of diverse publishing practices of the publisher such as “reducing” the books, publishing “un/complete” translations or labelling translations divergently. Moreover, it reveals that the decisions taken in the publishing processes are usually market-driven. The notion of market convenience provides an explanation for the translation or labeling practices such re/translation, re/print, censorship and cutting in readers’ views and that being the case, readers try to urge publishers to take decisions particularly on the grounds of not reducing or censoring texts and high quality in translation practices.

When the owner of information is unsure: Epistemic uncertainty influences evidentiality processing in Turkish

This study deals with the extent to which epistemic uncertainty influences processing of grammatical evidentiality – the linguistic reference to information source – in Turkish native speakers. Across a series of sentence reading experiments administered to groups of Turkish adult native speakers, this study showed that indirect evidentiality in firsthand witnessing contexts evoked greater post-interpretive disruptions (Experiment 1), and were found largely unfavourable (Experiment 2), suggesting that in Turkish, speaking about one's own information with indirect evidentiality leads to an inherent effect. Furthermore, a first-person's witnessed information marked with direct evidentiality is found to be rather unacceptable or unsettling under low epistemic certainty conditions, where the speaker is unsure of his/her own witnessing (Experiment 3), whilst a non-first-person's information blends well with uncertainty constraints for which, Turkish readers strongly favour the assumption marker (Experiment 4). This study indicates that Turkish speakers’ sensitivity to uses of evidentiality is influenced by the ‘uncertainty of information owner’. There is a semantic overlap and a complex interface between evidentiality and epistemic modality in Turkish, and this interface is mediated by the ownership of information (first-person versus non-first-person) and the owner's uncertainty about his/her information. Further implications are discussed.

The Representations of Kurdish Women in Selected Turkish Novels

The representations of minorities by the mainstream writers have frequently been viewed negatively. The depiction has been of a major concern to the literary writings. However, the representations of Kurdish women in Turkish literary works has rarely been tackled in scholarly papers and researches. Generally, the life of a Kurdish woman is molded by patriarchal practices, traditions, and customs that govern all social zones, rather than the legal rights. The patriarchal ideologies embedded in women’s mind make them believe that they could do nothing but what is expected from them; to be submissive and obedient.This research paper focuses on the representation of the Kurdish women in selected modern Turkish novels by three particular Turkish novelists: Honor (Penguin, 2012) by Elif Shafak written in English language ; Face to Face by Ayşe Kulin (Everest, 2006) written in Turkish ; The Legend of Ararat ( Collins and Harvill Press, 197) by Yashar Kemal written in Turkish . The research aims at selecting a variety of authors based on gender, ethnicity, Language and region. Yashar Kemal, is a Turkish writer of a Kurdish origin from Gökçedam, a village in the southern province of Osmaniya; Elif Shafak, is a Turkish-British writer who lives abroad and Ayşe Kulin, a woman writer from Istanbul. By means of textual analysis, the study investigates the representation of Kurdish women in these texts. Through a comparative approach, the paper endeavors to examine the ways in which the selected authors depict the Kurdish women and their social predicaments in their fictional works. Moreover, it investigates the images and conditions these authors depict to the mainstream Turkish readers as well as to the public readers in the rest of the world. This is portrayed through the construction of specific female characters that enhances a stereotype Kurdish women, who are powerless, submissive, ignorant and victims of the patriarch Kurdish society in southwest Turkey. It also explore the diversity in the authors' representation; the sympathetic to the Kurds, challenging the stereotypes viewpoints of the Kurdish women or the negative image and the harsh representation that includes depicting misconceptions and defects in the construction of the Kurdish identity and social structure. The women in the novels are presented as victims of the gender-based system simply for having been born female; they are marginalized and discriminated against in a variety of ways.

Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature by Gloria Fisk

Reviewed by: Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature by Gloria Fisk Yuqian Cai Fisk, Gloria. Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 2018. Pp. 280. US$65.00 hardcover, US$64.99 ebook. What is “the good” of world literature? To begin with, it must be “good” world literature; following Pamuk in holding high standards for the “global” novel, Gloria Fisk considers literary merit a prerequisite for anything to qualify as world literature. But for Americans, “world literature” usually means just “world literature (in English or English translation).” Whereas New York and London are the present headquarters for what Pascale Casanova calls “the world republic of letters,” writers in languages other than English, especially non-Western writers such as Pamuk, are subjugated to “uneven processes of translation, circulation, and judgment” in the West, which Fisk’s scholarly debut tackles. Thanks to her experience in Turkey, Fisk includes a Turkish perspective on Pamuk and problematizes the Western point of view. Reading Pamuk as her central case study along with other Nobel laureates, Fisk defends these writers’ literary value and autonomy against political imposition and instrumentalization, and she probes what good the global novel and novelist, and American literary critics, can do. From the onset, Fisk is concerned with author-reader relations in an uneven trans-national sphere. Introducing Pamuk as a global novelist who engages a literary public “as rich in cultural capital as it is far-flung,” Fisk reads Pamuk’s canonization as a “Rorschach test” to see what it takes for a non-Western writer to become an author of world literature accessible to Western readers. Put simply, Pamuk is appreciated by the Western public not so much for his craft as for his service as a “bridge between East and West,” who brings cultural and political good, such as solidarity among strangers, to audiences unfamiliar with a world that they expect a national spokes-person or native guide to reliably show, albeit through fiction. Pamuk was further rewarded with a Nobel Prize soon after he touched on “the Armenian issue,” which remade him into a public figure and brought against him a criminal charge for his “insult to Turkishness.” The polarized reception of Pamuk in Turkey and the West highlights the politicization of international prizes and the asymmetries in world-literary formation. It also reflects a Western penchant for fusing the aesthetic with the political as the criterion for literary merit, as Fisk discerns, while in the US, [End Page 382] after multiculturalism won the canon wars, world literature has become what David Damrosch calls “windows into foreign worlds” without necessarily demonstrating the quality of masterpieces. That means, for Fisk, that in the West, especially America, the literary value of non-Western and multicultural texts is too often made contingent on political utility. Despite her insistence on aesthetic quality, Fisk mainly inquires into the cultural and political uses of world literature. She divides her book into three sections: “What Good Can a Novel Do?” “What Good Can a Novelist Do?” and “What Good Can World Literature Do?” The first section is further divided in two, the titles of which indicate the educational functions of the global novel: to teach Western readers about “other people” and “other people’s history.” This may seem commonplace, but what Fisk does is to analyze Pamuk’s own claims and writings, together with the testimonies of the “culture brokers of Western literary institutions” such as Margaret Atwood and the Swedish Academy, and with the critiques of Turkish readers who find in Pamuk a “betrayal of their national identity” or a “purveyor of the Orientalist propaganda.” Pamuk is more sophisticated than what he is typically praised for or accused of. In Snow (2002), for example, the characters embody a “full range of ideological factions” and express all kinds of viewpoints, including some that protest Western hegemony and doubt the odds of cross-cultural understanding. Fisk points out that Snow represents a version of Mikhail Bakhtin’s heteroglossia and of Rebecca Walkowitz’s “comparison literature,” and one might add that it also corroborates Adam Kirsch’s belief in the global novel’s capacity to encompass and...

Hint Düşüncesinde İslam Algısı

Cemil Kutlutürk, assistant professor in the Divinity School at Ankara University, who works on Hindu religious thought, published a book titled The Perception of Islam in Hindu Thought; A Case Study of Bhakti Movement. The publication offers an intensive study for Turkish readers. The work covers medieval India and elaborates on its political arena, historical atmosphere, and the rigid caste system that was entangled with every part of a Hindu’s life. In the Hindu worldview he explains, it was of utmost value to be engaged in the caste system and to live and die in it faithfully. Before the coming of Islam and its spread throughout the Indian subcontinent, both trade and pagan practices served as a uniting force between the two geographically different regions (p. 72). Such encounters between Arabs and Hindus are well documented in historical fragments, oriental travelogues, and remnants of poetry. One could say that this clash of religious and cultural identity was the actual origin of Bhakti movement. In a possible cultural intrusion, there are at least two possibilities: either embracing foreign thought—which was Islam in this case—and celebrating its fruits, or opposing the intruding thought through emphasizing one’s own rigid beliefs. Kutlutürk exhibits both phenomena in his present work and explains a third possibility: that of amalgamation, which happened in the form of Bhakti movement in India in the middle ages (11th to 17th century).

Fake News as a Tool of Populism in Turkey: The Pastor Andrew Brunson Case

Abstract This study examines how populist politicians made sense of the issue of fake news. They generally consider fake news as a valuable propaganda tool for their political interests. According to the Reuters Digital News Report in 2018, Turkey ranks first on the list of countries where people complain about completely made-up stories. The study researched how fake news is helping facilitate the rise of populism in Turkey. There is plenty of fake news aired by pro-government media. Therefore, the Turkish government is emerging as a suspect behind the fake news cycle. The fact is that most of the fake news is published for the benefit of the government. Research shows that, paradoxically, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is regarded as one of the most important populist politicians in the world. These two different indicators can be valuable data in revealing the relationship between fake news and populist politicians. The aim of this paper is to consider the significance of this apparent relationship between fake news and President Erdogan. In order to do this, a critical discourse analysis method was based on the fake news about the pastor Brunson case, because Turkish readers came across a huge amount of fake news regarding his case in pro-government media.

“Don’t Give Up! Don’t Give in!” Gender in International Relations and “Curious” Feminist Questions

“Don’t Give Up! Don’t Give in!” Gender in International Relations and “Curious” Feminist Questions