Browsing by Author "Cankara, Murat"

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Open Access
Ahmet Mithat Efendi ve Beşir Fuat'a göre gerçekçilik
(2004) Cankara, Murat
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.
Open Access
İmparatorluk ve roman : Ermeni harfli Türkçe romanları Osmanlı
(2010) Cankara, Murat
In this dissertation the early Turkish novels in the Armenian script are focused on. These novels are Hovsep Vartanyan’s Akabi Hikâyesi (1851), Hovhannes H. Balıkçıyan’s Karnig, Gülünya ve Dikran’ın Dehşetlü Vefatleri (1863) and Hovsep Maruş’s Bir Sefil Zevce (1868). Being written by Ottoman Armenians and published in Istanbul, all three appeared before the early Turkish novels in the Arabic script. The following are the primary aims of the dissertaion: 1) An evaluation and critique of the Ottoman/Turkish and Armenian literary historiographies both of which have overlooked or looked down upon the texts in question; 2) a contribution to and a theoretical and conceptual analysis of the cultural encounter between Ottoman Muslim/Turks and Armenians supported by new empirical evidence; 3) a comparison of early Turkish novels in the Arabic and Armenian scripts and, through this comparison, a questioning of the existing approaches to the latter which have also been called the “Tanzimat novel” and a contribution to the debate on to what extent the literatures produced by Ottoman millets had or could have common features. These are among the major findings that have been emphasized throughout the dissertation: 1) As far as literature is in question, the cultural encounter between Ottoman Muslim/Turks and Armenians should not only be discussed through a limited number of canonic literary texts but also by taking into account non-literary and non-textual means of encounter; 2) the authors of the early Turkish novels in Armenian and Arabic scripts appropriated different and at times conflicting features of European romanticism.