Ahmet Mithat Efendi ve Beşir Fuat'a göre gerçekçilik
Author
Cankara, Murat
Advisor
Mignon, Laurent
Date
2004Publisher
Bilkent University
Language
English
Type
ThesisItem Usage Stats
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Abstract
Mithat Efendi (1844-1912) and Beşir Fuat (1852-1887) by focusing on their
articles and letters on the subject.
It is usual to study the development of realism in Turkish literature by only
taking the novels into account. However, articles are a valuable source of
information in order to understand how realism was interpreted by Ottoman writers.
The texts focused on in this thesis are the newspaper articles and letters of Ahmet
Mithat Efendi and Beşir Fuat, who developed opposing views on realism. These
articles and letters were mostly published during the 1880s and 1890s.
Ahmet Mithat Efendi rejected realism both on aesthetic and non-aesthetic
grounds. Yet, it has also been noted that he used the concept of “verisimilitude” and
asserted that a novel should seem to be true even if it was imaginary. One other
important aspect of Ahmet Mithat’s interpretation of realism is his effort to
appropriate and adapt it to the Ottoman context. On the other hand, it has been
indicated that Beşir Fuat’s approach to literary realism is just the opposite of Ahmet
Mithat’s. Beşir Fuat, who criticizes romanticism, classical Ottoman poetry and the
role of imagination in literature underlines the necessity that a writer should work
like a historian or a sociologist. He is also against elaborate language and states that
the primary aim of the literary language is to transmit ideas to the reader in a clear
and exact way.
It has been concluded that there is not only one interpretation of realism in
Ottoman literature at the end of the nineteenth century. The fact that the writers of
the period did not simply imitate their French contemporaries and tried to transform
their conception of realism is also within the conclusions that have been reached.