Excavating Memory: Bilge Karasu’s Istanbul and Walter Benjamin’s Berlin

Description

This study moves the acclaimed Turkish fiction writer Bilge Karasu (1930–1995) into a new critical arena by examining his poetics of memory, as laid out in his narratives on Istanbul’s Beyoğlu, once a cosmopolitan neighborhood called Pera. Karasu established his fame in literary criticism as an experimental modernist, but while themes such as sexuality, gender, and oppression have received critical attention, an essential tenet of Karasu’s oeuvre, the evocation of ethno-cultural identity, has remained unexplored: Excavating Memory brings to light this dimension. Through his non-referential and ambiguous renderings of memory, Karasu gives in his Beyoğlu narratives unique expression to ethno-cultural difference in Turkish literature, and lets through his own repressed minority identity. By using Walter Benjamin’s autobiographical work as a heuristic premise for illuminating Karasu, Gökberk establishes an innovative intercultural framework, which brings into dialogue two representative writers of the twentieth century over temporal and spatial distances. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Beginnings: Representing Memory From Berlin’s Old West to Istanbul’s Beyoğlu: Narratives of Memory, Narratives of Lost Topographies Incompleteness as Anti-Autobiography: The Production and Publication Histories of Benjamin’s and Karasu’s Memory Narratives Bilge Karasu in Historical Context: Identity Formation in the Shadow of “Turkification” Forgetting, Remembering, and the Workings of Collective Memory: Survival and the Retrieval of Memory Traces “Dialectical Images” inBeyoğlu’s Black Waters: ThePhotograph as Testimony Remembering as Distortion: The Visual and Aural Traces of Alterity Spatiality as the Inscription of the Past Crazy Meryem as the Saint of Beyoğlu’s Marginalized: Toward a Final Reading of Difference Conclusion Addendum References Index