Latife Tekin'in yapıtlarında büyülü gerçekçilik
Author(s)
Advisor
Mignon, LaurentDate
2003Publisher
Bilkent University
Language
English
Type
ThesisItem Usage Stats
540
views
views
546
downloads
downloads
Abstract
Latife Tekin (b. 1957) is an influential writer whose early works had a deep
impact on Turkish literature during the 1980s. She focuses on the lives of the poor
and of people who migrated from villages to huge urban agglomerations. Social
strata that until now had mainly been narrated in realist and socialist realist works are
in the centre of Tekin’s magical realist works.
The aim of this thesis is to study Tekin’s use of magical realist narrative
techniques by exploring magical realism in her works. Apart from a few studies, her
works have not yet been submitted to detailed scrutiny. The publication of her first
work Dear Shameless Death (1983) was followed by several debates. However
critics mainly aimed at establishing whether the novel was “realist” or “socialist
realist”. Others criticized her for supposedly imitating Gabriel García Márquez’s
One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967).
Similar discussions on realism followed the publication of Berji Kristin:
Tales from the Garbage Hills (1984), her second novel where she explores life in the
villages and the suburbs, and again draws on Turkish oral traditions and Latin
American magical realism. Tekin makes use of the content and the forms of the oral
literary genres in her two novels, even though in the second one the focus is on the
hybridization of the genres. In Icy Swords (1989) she approaches magical realism
critically and reinterprets this literary approach in a original way.
A study of those magical realist works based solely on realist or socialist
realist criteria does not put enough focus on the formal originality and the content of
Tekin’s novels. Moreover, the accusation of imitation obscures Tekin’s originality in
appropriating Latin American magical realism.
The thesis is focused on the three above-mentioned works. The conclusion of
the study is that those aspects of the novels that were criticized by the apologists of
realism and social realism actually reveal the author’s complete mastery of magical
realist techniques. Tekin’s magical realism is far from being a mere imitation of
Latin American models: it is an original reinterpretation based on native literary
traditions. The synthesis of native and Latin American techniques is at the heart of
Tekin’s original works. Hence we may speak of a native form of magical realism.