Thesis (master's)--Bilkent Üniversitesi, Ankara, Turkey, 2003. / At head of title: Master tezi. Includes bibliographical references (p. 84-93).

Thesis (master's)--Bilkent Üniversitesi, Ankara, Turkey, 2003. / At head of title: Master tezi. Includes bibliographical references (p. 84-93).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Middle East Technical University, 2003. / Keywords: Self-reflexivity, Self-reflection, Mirror, Dreams, Fantasies, Reference and Difference, Self- Other Dichotomy, "I"dentity Crisis, Overt/Covert, Metafiction, Creative Process, Form, Linguistic Medium.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Istanbul University. / Includes bibliographical references (399-406) and index.

This dissertation shows that ideas of science and religion are not transhistorical by presenting a longue durée study of conceptions of science and religion in the Ottoman Empire. I demonstrate that the idea of science(s) was subject to a tectonic change over the course of a few centuries, namely between the early modern and modern period. Even within a specific epoch, conception of science and religion were in no way monolithic, as evidenced by the diversity of approaches to these categories in the early modern period. To point out continuity and change in the ideas of science and religion, I study classifications of sciences in the early modern Ottoman Empire, by comparing two works; one by Yahya Nev‘î and the other by Saçaklızâde Muhammed el-Mar‘aşî. Nev‘î wrote from the context of the court in Istanbul, while Saçaklızâde represented the madrasa environment in an Anatolian province, thus providing a contrast in their orders of knowledge. In addition, the dissertation includes a study of the concept of "jihat al-waḥda" (aspect of unity) of science, as discussed by commentators from the early modern period. After first providing a textual genealogy, I argue that this concept reveals the dominant paradigm of scientific thinking during this period. The last two chapters of the dissertation deal with modern Ottoman history. The third chapter analyzes Ahmed Cevdet Pasha's (d. 1895) translation of Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah into the Ottoman Turkish in order to show the shift in the conception of science in the mid-nineteenth century. I demonstrate both continuity and a break between the thought of Ibn Khaldun and Ahmed Cevdet Pasha. In the fourth chapter, I draw upon archival documents, a scientific journal, and a correspondence between two intellectuals namely Fatma Aliye and Ahmed Midhat, to point out that science, religion, and politics were separated as a consequence of state regulations over publications and civil societies together with other institutional reforms and educational policies. The dissertation raises questions about the historiography of science in the modern period, which takes the modern idea of science for granted and projects it back on to the earlier periods. Noting the anachronistic and presentist approach to the early modern period, the dissertation calls for a new kind of historiography that not only goes beyond our modern biases but learns from past experiences by seriously engaging them.

A comparative study of Arabic and Turkish literary modernity, this dissertation investigates the rhetoric of authority in Ottoman-Arab and -Turkish literary, literary-historical, and literary critical discourses in the nineteenth century. Bringing together examples of travelogue, fiction, literary history and criticism, I attend to the divided and divisive figures of the sovereign and the author in order to examine the crises and transformations of political and literary authority in this period. Through an extended conversation with the recent historiography of the late-Ottoman Empire, I illustrate how the divisions and dispersions of the author’s body in these texts mirror the diffusion, dispersion, and dissipation of sultanic sovereignty, slowly being disembodied from the Sultan’s body, and how this pairing, in turn, testifies to the contradictions that inhere in the emergent possibilities of popular, political and literary, representation. Juxtaposing (de)formations and representations of sovereign bodies with contemporary (de)constructions of authorial bodies, I claim that certain theological and political aspects associated with the sultan’s body henceforth come to be taken up by the body of the author. It is the concurrent excess and deficiency of this transfer and translation—and the force and weakness that is at once associated with the act of writing—that defines the modern crisis of representation. To make sense of the institution of modern literature in Arabic and Turkish—and of other new modalities of political and cultural representation—it is necessary to attend to the crises of late-Ottoman sovereignty, as well as to the avenues of enchantment and disenchantment thereby opened. In three chapters bookended with an introduction and conclusion, I focus on the works of Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq (1804-1886), Namık Kemal (1840-1888), Beşir Fuad (1852-1887), and Ibrāhīm al-Muwayliḥī (1844-1906) to articulate—through the coupling of the two bodies of the sovereign and the author—a critique of literary modernity in its relation to shifting discourses of political and literary authority.

This thesis presents a comparative and interdisciplinary investigation into the relationship between politics and the Turkish and Kurdish novels, which are treated not only as artistic constructions but also as socio-cultural and historical artefacts. The primary objective of this investigation is to understand the principle social, political, and historical reasons and root causes behind the close relationship between politics and literatures in Turkey and the principle socio-political and literary ramifications of such strong relationship. Towards this end, the thesis focuses on four main themes: language, love, religion, and history. Besides being the most common novelistic themes in the Turkish and Kurdish literary institutions, these are inherently heavily politicised and ethno-nationalistically charged themes - thus especially suitable for such inquiry. In line with this politico-historical and literary vein, the thesis also discusses some of the main political questions in Turkey, viz., the reasons behind the failure of Turkish democracy, its maladies and the resultant deadlock on some of the most important issues of the modern history of the country such as the Kurdish imbroglio and the conflict of secularisation and Islam. As the discussions on politics of love, language, religion, and history show, profound ideological competitions and antagonisms do not necessarily mean divergent political and literary structures. As such, the strong links between the Turkish and Kurdish literary institutions, as well as the ordeal of the Kurdish question and democratisation in Turkey, is as much caused by rival nationalisms, hostile ideological positions, and the like as by congruity, parallel political visions, and similar power structures. The main argument of the thesis, thus, is that the Kurdish and Turkish literary, political, and intellectual actors could not contribute towards the solution of the persistent political and literary questions in Turkey because of their failure in adopting a transformative politics and developing fully autonomous literatures. The future of the two literatures, as was in the past, this thesis argues, will remain intrinsically bound to the political structures and developments and the future of democracy in Turkey.

No description available.

The aim of this dissertation is to discuss the image of the city of Diyarbakır as emerging from Kurdish and Turkish literature throughout the twentieth century. Diyarbakır city represents a highly contentious place in socio-political and cultural terms for the Kurdish vis-à-vis the Turkish imagined community. The first chapter is dedicated to the image of the city previous to the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923 as emerging from accounts of travellers from different ages and different languages. Then, in four different chapters, four different corpuses of Turkish and Kurdish literature are taken under the focus of the analysis. Each corpus allows the discussion of certain aspects and themes related to the city. Overall, each chapter and each corpus constitute a piece of the deconstructed literary image of the city, which is at the centre of this research. Since Diyarbakır is a contested city, its representations are deeply involved in processes of appropriation and symbolization of place. Therefore, in the shaping of literary Diyarbakır throughout the twentieth century, the conflicting political dynamics between the Turkish State and local Kurdish actors play a crucial role.

Thesis (doctoral) - Universität, Istanbul, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 179-185).