An Implausible Juncture? Locating the Turkish Novel in an American Frame, from Neocolonial Anxiety to the ‘Threshold Novel’

Year 2017, Issue: 46, 3 - 28, 01.04.2017

Elena Furlanetto

Abstract

My study investigates the possibility of a “juncture” between the Turkish and the American in a body of texts that do not simply represent another instance of national literature gone international, but a successful case of bi-cultural literature. The following paper will strengthen the ‘American’ frame around Turkish American literature by presenting three areas in which the “juncture” is particularly evident: first, the work of Halide Edip as the origin of the juncture and of Turkish American literature at large; second, the perception of Americanization in Turkey in the work ofAlev Lytle Croutier; third, the issue of hybrid authorship in Elif Shafak´s 2010 novel The Forty Rules of Love.These three fields of analysis aim to show how Turkish American novels engage in a constant dialogue with the American literary and cultural tradition. This tripartite approach attempts to delineate a trajectory of Turkish American literature from an initial stage, where the view of the relationship with the United States is dominated by neocolonial anxieties, to more recent aesthetics of reconciliation. Through this discussion I hope to portray, perhaps provocatively, that Turkish American literature, as Rebecca Walkowitz has argued depends “more on a book’s future than on a writer’s past.”

Keywords

Hybridity, Turkish experience abroad, Adıvar, Croutier, Shafak

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