Gülçehre Kurt | Dokuz Eylül University Graduate School of Social Science

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Papers by Gülçehre Kurt

The flaneur's gaze in Edgar Allan Poe's The Man of the Crowd portrays the modern urban space in i... more The flaneur's gaze in Edgar Allan Poe's The Man of the Crowd portrays the modern urban space in its anxious and desperate crowd's mundane rush. The narrator reflects the foggy, messy, mysterious, and uncanny texture of Victorian London. Unlike the flaneur of Poe, Emily Dickinson's faceless narrator in Hope is the Thing with Feathers portrays an optimistic sphere found in the harsh and strange nature. In this sense, both the pieces delineate an anti-conformist landscape pushing the human into the limits of survival. The sole difference is their perspectives in conveying the same philosophy. The environment in The Man of the Crowd is built through the impressionistic gaze of the flaneur who atones his solitude by integrating his narration into the landscape. In this sense, the environment is an extension of his mysterious self; reflecting his dualistic nature who is stuck in between order and disorder. Like Poe's, Dickinson's environment is a metaphor for the mysterious human psyche. In this spiritual realm, it is the disorder of the harsh nature that calls into being the humanely perseverance. Thus, in both of the texts, the human is ontologically bound to the landscape, almost at a naturalistic tone. The Flaneur's dualistic nature also reflects the dualistic nature of the urbanity. The opposing principles portray the crowd, as it is divided by the wealthy and the poor; by the

Sarah Orne Jewett's "Country of the Pointed Firs" recounts the everyday life of a matriarchal com... more Sarah Orne Jewett's "Country of the Pointed Firs" recounts the everyday life of a matriarchal community through the gaze of a disguised female narrator in her effort of reclaiming her identity. The novel almost portrays a dreamscape of the narrator into the pre-industrial Edenic community, where she discovers the most humane liaison in the reflexive relationship of fertility and destruction. In her escape to the pre-oedipal realm, she mimicks the child’s duplicated ego in the mother, as she reconstructs her ideal-I in the archaic mother.

This paper aims to interrogate the postmodernist stance in Naked Lunch, written by William S. Bur... more This paper aims to interrogate the postmodernist stance in Naked Lunch, written by William S. Burroughs, to bring about a skeptical approach to the nature of non-essentialistic estranged truth. For doing so, Burroughs' postmodernist technics in narration, setting, and characterization are reinterpreted by drawing parallels with the post-truth age characteristics. The method follows a cross-questioning of the postmodernist nomadic locality and its position as an instrument of revolt against the mainstream. The skeptical reinterpretation then suggests that Burroughs' novel might be a mimicry of post-truth cynicism. In this cynicism, Burroughs' nomadic locality reproduces its subjective truth to rationalize the trauma of pluralistic mendacity. Naked Lunch: A Mimicry of Post-truth Era ? For some literary critics, it is a crystal clear fact that William S. Burroughs, by his estranged narrative in Naked Lunch, revolts against totalitarian metanarratives in seeding a skepticism by the nomadic localism. He does so by breaking the cause and effect linearity in literary realism, as this realism is positioned in the throne of universal codes bonding the

This paper aims to interrogate the love relationship between the main protagonists in Threesome w... more This paper aims to interrogate the love relationship between the main protagonists in Threesome written by Yussef El Guindi, to settle down a Lacanian psychoanalytic approach on the true nature of love and desire. The method first follows a structuralist deconstruction of the binaries of male and female identities within the dichotomies of authority and obedience. Through these dichotomies, the characters' reflexive identities are analyzed to reflect on the foundations of their love relationship to show how they fail to survive in the realm of the ideal where the Lacanian concept "phallus" as the "object cause of desire" cannot operate. To do so, the mechanics of Lacanian desire are also introduced to clarify where the protagonists as subjects are positioned within the "imaginary" and the "symbolic".

An interrogation of Rudolfian "death" in the movies "2001: A Space Odyssey", "Arrivals" and "Tree... more An interrogation of Rudolfian "death" in the movies "2001: A Space Odyssey", "Arrivals" and "Tree of Life". This paper delineates a theological approach to the concept of death and rebirth to interrogate the Nietzschean "Übermensch" in the three movies mentioned above. To do so, Rudolfian concepts such as "numinous", "mysterium tremendum", and "creaturehood" are traced in the themes, motifs, and symbolism in the director's choice.

Fantastik müdahalelerden inanılmaz bir ustalıkla arı kalmayı başarmış uzak-gerçekci bir kurgu ola... more Fantastik müdahalelerden inanılmaz bir ustalıkla arı kalmayı başarmış uzak-gerçekci bir kurgu olan "Yıldızlararası", milenyumun en popüler bilimsel soyutluklarını pratiğe döker. Film insan soyunun tükenmeye yüz tuttuğu, kıtlığın kırıp geçirdiği distopik ve fütürist bir zamanda başlar ve yeni bir ev-gezegen bulma amacıyla gerçekleştirilen uzay yolculuklarından biriyle devam eder.

Bu yazı, karşılaştırmalı üslup kullanarak, Nietzche'nin "Bengi Dönüş" konseptini ve bunun Milan K... more Bu yazı, karşılaştırmalı üslup kullanarak, Nietzche'nin "Bengi Dönüş" konseptini ve bunun Milan Kundera'nın " Varolmanın Dayanılmaz Hafifliği" adlı romanındaki reddedilişini kısaca inceleyecektir. Geleneksel felsefenin Sonsuzluk ve Zaman kavramlarını idea ve fenomenler dünyasının nitelikleri olarak ele alışlarındaki problematik durumun çözümlemesinin yapıldığı Heidegger'in "Varlık ve Zaman" eserinden anekdotlarla yazıya giriş yapılacak ve bu sayede çağlar boyunca Zamanın Sonsuzluğun hareket eden bir izdüşümünden başka bir şey olmadığını savunan klasik görüşün antitezi sunulacaktır.

a dystopian short fiction, written by me

The flow of time and the life itself would not let the "Others" to interfere, otherwise, these tw... more The flow of time and the life itself would not let the "Others" to interfere, otherwise, these two obstacles couldn't force them to live in total casualness that brings also the bitter. They have their lives set upon homicides, rapes, incest relationships, prostitution and gambling. Eventually, they are the sons and daughters forgotten by his community living in entangled suburbs where the children are hungry, the women are to be owned and the men are murderers. Even if they are the anti heroes of a distopian world, they are naïve enough, and they want to be freed of the agony. "Elemge", the novel written by Canan Akyuz containing twelve entangled short stories that each of them help complete a violent big picture in a naturalistic manner, drives the reader into speculations about the source and the results of the agony in life in general , and how come every single existence-conscious or unconscious-on Earth share literarly the same agony; path/destiny. In the novel, the earth is a reel that spins and the lives are the wash

A True Sci Fi Dealing with the Problem of Time

This paper focuses on an analysis of postmodern narrative techniques in Milan Kundera's The Unbea... more This paper focuses on an analysis of postmodern narrative techniques in Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being to prevail how the ontological boundaries between fact and fiction are blurred and how the polyphonic texture of the text allows parodying the linearity of historical narratives. In doing so, Kundera uses intertextuality to resituate these boundaries to interrogate historical representations to question the ways in which history has totalized and marginalized specific groups of people and their perspectives. His text displaying the sense of truth that history claims to give being deliberately parodied by the lack of origin manifests itself in postmodernist fiction. Consequently, his interruptions as a self-reflexive author inducing in fragmentations with shifts on focalization would result in the subversion of the authority and the fabulation of the authority of history itself.

Conference Presentations by Gülçehre Kurt

This paper aims, in a perspectivist attitude, to interrogate Nietzsche's concept of "eternal recu... more This paper aims, in a perspectivist attitude, to interrogate Nietzsche's concept of "eternal recurrence" and its denial in the novel of Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." As a starting point, Heidegger's challenge in "Being and Time" with the traditional philosophy which comprehends the eternity and time, as features of the ideal and phenomenal world will be prevailed to highlight how the interpretation of time as a moveable image of eternity is to be mistaken; to him, time apart from "Dasein"'s original temporality is nothing, it does not find its meaning in eternity, but in death. Further, his suggestion that this traditional perception of time to be a linear series of "now" points that can be measured according to the modification of present was merely a desire to overcome time and indeed mortality will be clarified. For such a claim, Heidegger's adherence to Kant's "Copernican Turn" will be examined. Turning back to Nietzsche's contest to this Western tradition in his book "Thus spoke Zarathustra" ignoring the linearity of time, and forwarding the circularity that stresses on an eternal repetition of occurrences which foreshadows the concept of life after death ad infinitum results in the very "existence" to be "the heaviest of burdens" is to be discussed. The challenge back by Milan Kundera in his "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" with his suggestion that human time is indeed linear, and human existed only once, therefore must be free of any burden will be compared to Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence" to clarify Kundera's concept of "lightness."

Drafts by Gülçehre Kurt