Browsing by Subject "Poets, Turkish 20th century Criticism and interpretation."

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    Oktay Rifat şiirinde güneş'in üç hali
    (2005) Akgül, Alphan
    The poetic transformation, which Oktay Rifat (1914-1988) has experienced since his titled Perçemli Sokak (1956), corresponds to a process moving from “language” towards “perception”. After this work Rifat used the “sun” as an object of analogy reducing it to “similarities” and after Çobanıl Şiirler (1976), he used the “sun” as a natural object of “perception”. Rifat’s employment of “nature” by reducing it to similarities turns into a unique style, which corresponds to the styles of interpretation of not only archaic societies but also of despotic ones. After Perçemli Sokak the relationships of similarities may be observed through the concepts of equivalence principle and metaphor. In his poems in which the tenor and the vehicle appear together, Rifat produces a plurality that is reduced to similarities. Because in these poems the sun is treated equivalently with the things that are likened to it in terms of any one of their specific characteristics. In this sense, according to their occurrences in Rifat’s poems, equivalences such as “sun-shepherd”, “sun-father”, “breasts-sun”, “sunmillet”, “sun-sword”, and “sun-memory” are typical. The usage of “sun” reduced to such similarities can only be observed in the poems “Denklem” and “Kaval” in Elifli (1980), and “Gün Doğuyor” in Denize Doğru Konuşma (1982), all of which were published after Çobanıl Şiirler. In Rifat’s “sultan poems” in Yeni Şiirler (1973), what prevails is the employment of the metaphorical language. In these poems, the sun is in close relationship with the “palace metaphor”, which Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar considered to be a concept that can be identified with the general structure of the Ottoman Poem. The fact that this concept of “palace metaphor” is based on the similarity relationships between the qualities of the “sun” and the “sultan”, made it possible to establish a similarity with “sultan imagery”, emphasized by the “sultan poems” in Yeni Şiirler. The parallelism which is compatible with the content of the “palace metaphor”, constructed between the burning effect of the sun and the mortality of the sultan, is reproduced in Rifat’s poem in order to create a “singular” discourse by constructing the metaphors of sultan, using the words “executioner”, “cruel”, “hyena” and “lion”. The expression “orange bird”, in “The Earthquake of 1509 ”, may be added to this singular discourse in terms of its correspondence with the image of “Sultan” in Ahmet Paşa’s (d.1496/7) “Güneş Kasidesi”. After Çobanıl Şiirler, however, Oktay Rifat may be said to have shifted from the employment of equivalence principle and metaphor into a kind of poem in which the use of metonymy is dominant. In the applications of metonymy, the sun is represented not by the things that resemble it, but by any of its natural qualities that correspond to its different appearances in nature. The sun’s metonymic usage, by being reduced to its different appearances in nature, made it possible to produce a “plural” discourse.
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    Turgut Uyar'ın Divan'ında bir araç olarak biçim = Form as an instrument in Turgut Uyar's Divan
    (2005) Özer, Nilay
    In 1970 Turgut Uyar, one of the leading members of the poetry movement known as the “second new”, published a collection of poems entitled Divan. This collection differs from his other works in that it contains poems in couplets employing the Ottoman gazel, kaside, and rubai forms. Following the publication of Divan, Uyar found himself at the very center of the controversy on “benefiting from the tradition” and he received mixed reviews, from great praises to serious downright criticism. He responded to the praises and criticisms by stressing the claim that he was not a traditionalist poet but that he only employed traditional forms merely as instruments to achieve specific ends. The aim of this thesis is to identify Uyar’s stance with regard to Ottoman divan poetry, in order to determine his conception of the tradition and to study his “instrumentalization of form” by analyzing Divan under the guidance of his own statements. This thesis argues in four chapters that in Turgut Uyar’s Divan there is an overarching theme of popular revolution. In the first chapter, preparation for the revolution, the problematic of “alienation” and the relation between the form and concept of “continuity” are analyzed. The second chapter, which examines the “stream” metaphor in the book, deals with Uyar’s stance with regard to Ottoman divan poetry in the context of form-content incongruity, and discusses the issue of “form as medium of ideology”. The third chapter questions the relationship between history and form along with the concepts of “typification,” “homology” and “correspondence”. The last chapter, examines the disjunction between the center and the periphery on social as well as literary planes, and dwells on the concept of “nomadic war machine,” as well as on the subjects of resistance to public culture, mysticism, heterodoxy, and activism. In his Divan, Turgut Uyar sought to bring forth the culture of the populace, and in resorting to revolutionary content while covering the theme of the struggle of the oppressed classes, he employed “obsolete” and “superceded” poetic forms to attack Ottoman “court literature” and strove to rewrite that literature in a way that would reflect the values of the masses.