Yeşim İpekçi | Firat University (original) (raw)

research by Yeşim İpekçi

Liam O'Flaherty (1896-1984)

Interventions, 2023

This interview with the writer Indra Sinha, conducted in Toulouse, France in June 2017 and rework... more This interview with the writer Indra Sinha, conducted in Toulouse, France in
June 2017 and reworked in January 2020, is a product of my research on the
relatively recent theoretical endeavour to interrogate the relationship
between postcolonial and ecocritical studies. Indra Sinha’s fictional and
non-fictional works have substantially contributed to the international
visibility of human and environmental injustices around the world,
suggesting his potential engagement with the relationship between these
two theoretical frameworks. In the interview conducted within this
context, Sinha’s debut novel Animal’s People (2007), shortlisted for the
2007 Man Booker prize, is discussed as a postcolonial eco-socialist work
offering a fictitious account of neo-colonial practices in India. The novel,
particularly as the literary representation of the Bhopal disaster, sheds light
upon the continuous destruction of human and non-human beings in
postcolonial lands under neo-colonial policies. Yet, Sinha’s ardent
problematization of ‘postcolonialism’ as a label in particular, and of all
labels in general for delineating literary works, complicates, albeit
fruitfully, the course of the interview and our discussion of new theoretical
frameworks emerging out of postcolonial theory. His responses on this issue are powerful statements calling for a particular focus on, if any -isms
deemed necessary, transnational capitalism and ‘traditional old-fashioned
extortionism’ instead of postcolonialism.

DTCF Journal, 2023

The American-English writer Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) has been an inuential gure in the English ... more The American-English writer Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) has been an inuential gure in the English modernist ction. Her works challenge the conventional approaches to sex/gender categories through experimentation on the level of both context and form. Barnes's tendency to uncover the uidity of subjectivity and disrupt the Cartesian understanding of the stable Self particularly shows itself in her problematization of genre categories. In other words, she offers a radical critique of “naturalized” gender/sex categories in her works by re-formulating a wide range of genres. Reading her three short stories, written under the pseudonym Lydia Steptoe, this study aims to explore how she plays with the diary form and why she locates it within the genre of short story. It argues that Barnes's “The Diary of a Dangerous Child” (1922), “The Diary of a Small Boy” (1923), and “Madame Grows Older: A Journal at the Dangerous Age” (1924) shed light on the feminist/poststructuralist notion of the subject-in-the-making through the reappropriation of the diary form within the genre of short story. Her experimentation on the genre functions to lay bare the production and destabilisation of gender boundaries, and thus, presents diary writing as part of storytelling as a subversive act witnessing and/or contributing to the ontological becoming of subjects.

Atatürk University Journal of Faculty of Letters , 2020

Longinus's On the Sublime brought the concept of the sublime to the centre of the Neoclassical an... more Longinus's On the Sublime brought the concept of the sublime to the centre of the Neoclassical and the Romantic aesthetics from the 17 th century onwards. His conception of the sublime inspired Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756/57) and Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgement (1790) in the 18 th century. Burke and Kant both differentiated the sublime from the beautiful as an aesthetic category. Longinus's non-differentiation between these categories is the motivation behind both the Neoclassical and the Romantic claim on his conception of the sublime. Relating the Longinian sublime to Burke and Kant's dualistic approach to the beautiful and the sublime, this study argues that Burke's reconsideration of the Longinian sublime in its empirical relation to the object and Kant's reformulation of it as a transcendental quality of the mind have all progressively empowered the sublime's dominion over the beautiful, symbolising the Romantic takeover against the Neoclassical.

Çankaya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2020

As of December 2020, we are honored to present the 14/2 issue of Çankaya University Journal of Hu... more As of December 2020, we are honored to present the 14/2 issue of Çankaya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences. As in our earlier issues, in this issue of the volume too, we continue to cover interdisciplinary studies at the intersection of different areas of the human sciences that fall within the scope of the Journal and to share new perspectives in the humanities. To this end, the present issue, consisting of articles originally presented as papers at the 24th METU British Novelists International Conference, is devoted to Julian Barnes’s work. This conference series, organized by the Department of Foreign Language Education at Middle East Technical University, receives the interest of international scholars and welcomes fruitful discussions on a single British author each year. In 2018, the theme of the conference was “Julian Barnes and His Work,” and the keynote speaker was Prof. Dr. Vanessa Guignery from École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France. We are honoured to give place to her stimulating study in this volume along with the work of the other authors whose research on Barnes is well-known. Guignery’s study “uncovers the intricate palimpsest of Barnes’s work” through the author’s archives, and it shows in an astonishing way the novelist’s careful character construction with specific traits and voices, particularly in the "diptych" Talking It Over (1991) and Love, etc. (2000). The articles in the present issue cover a wide variety of Barnes’s novels, short stories, the author’s personal notes and sketches, and also the film adaptation of his 2011 novel, The Sense of an Ending. Mustafa Kırca mkirca@gmail.com Editor-in-Chief

Papers by Yeşim İpekçi

The Journal of Social Sciences, 2019

Byron and Shelley, among the second generation Romantics, empowered their poetry by unleashing a ... more Byron and Shelley, among the second generation Romantics, empowered their poetry by unleashing a revolutionary spirit regardless of any geographical, cultural, social and political limitation. This revolutionary spirit idealized by the two Romantics gave birth to two mutually exclusive compositions of the mythical insurgent Prometheus in variant literary forms. Shaped by his empirically-grounded understanding of the world and his referential use of language, Byron's Prometheus is portrayed in his poem Prometheus in the image of a Byronic hero, turning into a symbol for his conception of victorious death. Shelley's Prometheus emancipated through an empirical transcendence and evocative language in his lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound, on the other hand, is represented as a symbol of selfless love fostering the never-extinguishing passion for reforming the mind and the world. Accordingly, this study intends to explore how Shelley's Prometheus, empowered with his understanding of 'selfless love', transcends Byron's Prometheus embodying the Byronic idea of 'victorious death'.

Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007), as a strong example of transnational environmental writings... more Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007), as a strong example of transnational environmental writings, offers an imaginary re-working of the Bhopal disaster that occurred in 1984 in India. It depicts the aftermath of the chemical disaster in Khaufpur/Bhopal through fictitious tape recordings by the protagonist Animal. Set in a considerably destructed postcolonial environment, the novel enables merging postcolonial and ecocritical approaches in order to examine ecological consequences of environmental disasters on human and nonhuman beings. On the human level, this study scrutinizes the ecological alienation of the Khaufpuris by their transformation into toxic bodies due to the high level of chemical leakage in Khaufpur. On the nonhuman level, the study particularly analyses the irreparable impacts of the chemical disasters upon the environment by taking into account the harm to the non-human beings such as air, water, soil, flora and fauna that struggle to survive in a poisoned environm...

Atatürk Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Dergisi, Dec 18, 2020

Julian Barnes’s England, England: A Literary Portrayal of Individual and Collective Psychosis İngiltere İngiltere’ye Karşı: Bireysel ve Kolektif Psikozun Edebi Bir Portresi, 2020

Julian Barnes's England, England (1998) has been widely studied in relation to the concept of Eng... more Julian Barnes's England, England (1998) has been widely studied in relation to the concept of Englishness within its social, historical, political, and cultural implications regarding England of the late 20 th century. As is foregrounded in this study, the novel places interwoven narratives of the individual and the national self to the centre in order to question their interrelated lack of authenticity. Focusing on the issue of authenticity from the Lacanian psychoanalytic model, this paper specifically seeks to analyse how individual and collective psychosis operate within the novel.

Conference Presentations by Yeşim İpekçi

16th ESSE Conference 2022 Mainz Calls for Papers is still open, 2022

Session 20. Hideous progeny? Reanimations of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein This seminar will examin... more Session 20. Hideous progeny? Reanimations of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein This seminar will examine rewritings and transmedial adaptations of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818). Shelley's novel has been the subject of reworking and revision since William Godwin made substantive alterations to the text for the second edition of 1823, the same year Richard Brinsley Peake's stage adaptation, Presumption, premiered at the English Opera House. Since then, Frankenstein and his monster have been reanimated on page, stage and TV, in films, cartoons, comics, graphic novels, video games, and other media, as well as in many different languages. Wikipedia lists 74 cinematic adaptations alone, ranging from the lost 1915 horror film Life Without Soul to Tim Burton's Frankenweenie. These reanimations have offered multiple (re)interpretations of the story, from transcreations that endeavour to be faithful to the pathos of the novel, to parodies, to contemplations on creation, identity and the creative nature of science and art that take Mary Shelley's work as their starting point before diverging dramatically from it in any number of ways. We would welcome academic papers exploring any and all such reanimations and/or their implications for adaptation, translation and transcreation studies and theory, as well as for our readings of Shelley's own text. We would also be very interested in receiving proposals for more practice-focused contributions from film-makers, artists, writers, translators, actors and other practitioners in any and all media, discussing their own creative responses to the novel. By bringing together scholars and practitioners working on and in different media, cultures and languages, we hope to gain new insights into how and why Frankenstein has continued to variously animate so many of us.

Books by Yeşim İpekçi

Book Reviews by Yeşim İpekçi

Andrew Mangham’s monograph entitled We Are All Monsters: How Deviant Organisms Came to Define Us ... more Andrew Mangham’s monograph entitled We Are All Monsters: How Deviant Organisms Came to Define Us (2023, The MIT Press) explores the polyvocal nature of monster science across the period 1750-1900 and its dialogue with nineteenth-century literature. Mangham’s “monsters,” as defined in biological sciences, are “organisms … born with at least one permanent physiological defect” (p. 1). Guided by the approach disability studies takes towards the term “disability,” he explores how monster science defines monstrosity “not as a failure, but as an embodiment of, or a cog in the machine of, organic law” (p. 2). Monsters with their corporeal
singularities and differences are integral to the laws of nature. They are not “by-products of the laws of natural development which they had failed in varying ways to embody,” but “the adaptive workings and the dynamic forces to which all life forms, normal and abnormal, owe their being” (p. 2). In other words, congenital anomalies or corporeal deviations are structural variations which are not the antithesis of what is “normal” or “natural,” but significations of life’s variety and the ingenuities of nature. Mangham’s choice of literary works from the long nineteenth century helps explore the interplay between monster science and literary or imaginary monsters, emphasizing how they represent monstrosity as central to the interpretation of nature’s diversity and creativity. Offering an in-depth survey of monster science across the period and its literary reverberations in nineteenth-century novels, We Are All Monsters interrogates the causes and meanings of monstrosities with the claim that congenital structural deformities or differences are not failures or violations of nature’s laws, but symbols of vital creativity. With this claim at the center of his work, Mangham explores how Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1841), and Lucas Malet’s The History of Sir Richard Calmady (1901) engage in dialogue with the ideas developed in monster science and problematize the meanings of difference and normalcy.