Representing Censored Pasts: State-Violence in Twentieth Century Turkish and Spanish Literature.

State-violence and literature;Turkey and Spain;Representation;Realism and reenactment;Twentieth-century literature;General and Comparative Literature;Humanities (General);Middle Eastern;Near Eastern and North African Studies;Romance Languages and Literature;Humanities;Comparative Literature

Candar, BasakShammas, Anton ;

University of Michigan

关键词: State-violence and literature;    Turkey and Spain;    Representation;    Realism and reenactment;    Twentieth-century literature;    General and Comparative Literature;    Humanities (General);    Middle Eastern;    Near Eastern and North African Studies;    Romance Languages and Literature;    Humanities;    Comparative Literature;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/110327/bcandar_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

;;Representing Censored Pasts: State Violence in Twentieth Century Turkish and Spanish Literature;; examines literary representations of state-violence in Turkish and Spanish literature through an analysis of five works from the second-half of the twentieth century: Yaralısın (You Are Wounded) by Erdal Öz, Si te dicen que caí (The Fallen) by Juan Marsé, Kar (Snow) by Orhan Pamuk, and Cuaderno de Sarajevo (Sarajevo Notebook) and El sitio de los sitios (State of Siege) by Juan Goytisolo. While the first two works were written under repressive regimes, the rest are examples from after transitions to democracy. I focus on the challenges of fictionalizing historical traumas, which magnify tensions inherent to literature between fiction and reality, imagination and history. I contend that the works that thematize these difficulties provide the most effective representations by confronting readers with the same dilemmas that trouble their fictional frameworks. Such representations problematize their connections to reality, emphasizing their capacity to expose and reflect on historical contexts.Individual chapters analyze the ways in which each work negotiates the challenges of fictionalizing state-violence, articulated through the theories of Elaine Scarry, J.M. Coetzee and Shoshana Felman. In these chapters, I am concerned with the the dynamic relationship between state-violence and its literary representations. Through an analysis of these representations, I offer a reflection on the different uses and functions of realism in these works, as well as the links between realism and reenactment. This project offers a new comparative perspective. Turkey and Spain are not considered within a center-periphery model, or in a hierarchical relationship in which one is the model for the other, bur rather function as alternative voices within Comparative and World Literature that speak to each other from the geographical margins of Europe. Literary production in Turkey and Spain is fueled by national and cultural histories obsessed with a violent past that continues to assert its power in the present even after transitions into democracy. Based on this background, this comparison pushes back against the East/West divide by refusing to conceptualize either context as representative of East or West, arguing instead for equivalence within the comparative framework.