CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020
| Author | Demir, Handan |
|---|---|
| Title | Witnessing Torture: Two Turkish Novels in the Aftermath of the 1971 Coup d'Etat |
| Summary | The purpose of the present thesis is to offer a new interpretation of the literary representation of the unprecedently violent events brought about by the March 12 (1971) coup d’état in Turkey through two novels analyzed from the perspective of trauma, testimony, and narration. The 1971 coup encouraged many novelists to produce literary testimonials, which as a whole later began to be called March 12 literature. Even though this was the second military intervention in the history of Turkey, it differed from the first in that it led to the systematization of torture. By the same token, it also differed from the third military coup in 1980: Although the violence of this latter resulted in the definitive emasculation of an effective socialist politics, the March 12 coup introduced this violence, making it an event without a referent. The experience of torture and other kinds of violence, specifically the physical annihilation of the young leaders of the emergent guerilla groups, thus overflowed the usual perception of the literary left. As the main subject of these testimonials consequently resisted representation, the testimonial literature of the period often centered around characters with shattered individualities, either by the experience of torture or by their traumatic memories and the accompanying sense of guilt. In accordance with the idea that individual trauma becomes collective trauma through representation, the case novels analyzed in this thesis illustrate not only how the literary left of the period assumed a self-lacerating conscience in guise of self-criticism, but also how the unrepresentable essence of their subject distorted the narration in these literary testimonials. |
| Supervisor | Riedl, Matthias |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2020/demir_handan.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2025, Central European University