Excavating Memory: Bilge Karasu’s Istanbul and Walter Benjamin’s Berlin

Ülker Gökberk

Published by Academic Studies Press 2020

Excavating Memory

Bilge Karasu’s Istanbul and Walter Benjamin’s Berlin

Ülker Gökberk

In the series Ottoman and Turkish Studies

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781644694435

Overview
Contents

About this book

This book brings the Turkish writer Bilge Karasu (1930–1995) into a new critical spotlight by examining the author’s poetics of memory, as laid out in his narratives on Istanbul’s Beyoğlu. Gökberk contextualizes these posthumously published pieces in an approach informed by studies on memory, identity, place, and remembering as literary representation.

Author / Editor information

Gökberk Ülker :

Ülker Gökberk is Professor Emerita of German and Humanities at Reed College. The methodology and themes of her scholarship have been largely inspired by the paradigm intercultural German Studies. In her publications she has focused on models of cultural encounter and on different facets of alterity. Gökberk has worked with texts by German authors, ranging from Thomas Mann to Siegfried Lenz, as well as with those by Turkish-German authors. Her publications on modern Turkish literature include essays on Orhan Pamuk and Bilge Karasu. Aesthetic representations of displacement remain an ongoing concern of Gökberk’s critical inquiry.Ülker Gökberk is Professor Emerita of German and Humanities at Reed College. The methodology and themes of her scholarship have been largely inspired by the paradigm intercultural German Studies. In her publications she has focused on models of cultural encounter and on different facets of alterity. Gökberk has worked with texts by German authors, ranging from Thomas Mann to Siegfried Lenz, as well as with those by Turkish-German authors. Her publications on modern Turkish literature include essays on Orhan Pamuk and Bilge Karasu. Aesthetic representations of displacement remain an ongoing concern of Gökberk’s critical inquiry.

Reviews

"Excavating Memory by Ülker Gökberk is a distinctive work on Bilge Karasu’s Lağımlaranası ya da Beyoğlu. The book uses concepts derived from Walter Benjamin’s unconventional narratives on his Berlin childhood to reveal what Gökberk calls Karasu’s poetics of distortion: the stylistic ways through which Karasu’s writing works through his childhood memories and invokes the atmosphere of a bygone multicultural Beyoğlu. The book is strongest in applying Benjaminian concepts to read Lağımlaranası and shedding new light on Karasu’s inscriptions of alterity and uses of ambiguity as a literary method… All in all, Excavating Memory explains meticulously how Lağımlaranası is a testimonial to religious and ethnic alterity of the non-Muslim Beyoğlu residents. The book defines Karasu’s radical alterity with regard to his family background and it contributes to the theoretical framework of Karasu studies by using concepts that amplify this aspect of his works."

–Selen Erdoğan, Kadir Has Üniversitesi, Zemin

“Traversing time and space, Karasu’s Istanbul and Walter Benjamin’s Berlin bring into dialogue two representative writers of the twentieth century. Given their respective cultural and historical contexts they seem to be very unlikely partners, yet both reveal the hidden history of their time—Benjamin as a Jew in Berlin and Karasu as a Jewish-Greco Orthodox in Istanbul.

Ülker Gökberk incorporates Benjamin’s paradigm of remembrance, his memory model in reading Karasu’s narratives about his childhood in Istanbul/Beyoğlu. Benjamin’s rejection of the historicist/positivist method as mimetic realism widens the horizon of Bilge Karasu’s narratives that operate with distortion, displacement, and lapses. Bilge Karasu complicates autobiographical narrative through his poetics of memory, recovering the buried aspects of his selfhood inseparably linked to the homogenization process of Turkey as a nation-state. The gaps, discontinuities, and silences in the fragmented narratives of Karasu disclose his personal marginality in multiple ways.

Excavating Memory offers a perceptive reading that addresses historicity, cultural context, and autobiography. Gökberk illuminates the politics and possibilities of self-representation in non-mimetic autobiographical narratives with superb insight.”

—Prof. Dr. Nazan Aksoy, Bilgi University

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	x
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Beginnings: Reading Memory Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	19
2. From Berlin’s Old West to Istanbul’s Beyoğlu: Narratives of Memory, Narratives of Lost Topographies Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	53
3. Incompleteness as Anti-Autobiography: The Production and Publication Histories of Benjamin’s and Karasu’s Memory Narratives Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	85
4. Bilge Karasu in Historical Context: Identity Formation in the Shadow of “Turkification” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	106
5. Forgetting, Remembering, and the Workings of Collective Memory: Survival and the Retrieval of Memory Traces Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	128
6. “Dialectical Images” in Beyoğlu’s Black Waters: The Photograph as Testimony Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	157
7. Remembering as Distortion: Visual and Aural Traces of Alterity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	175
8. Spatiality as the Inscription of the Past Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	199
9. Crazy Meryem as the Saint of Beyoğlu’s Marginalized: Toward a Final Reading of Difference Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	227
Conclusion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	246
Addendum: Biographical Notes on Bilge Karasu Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	257
References Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	260
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	271

Language: English
Publisher: Academic Studies Press
Audience: College/higher education;Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 288
Keywords: cities; remembrance; vanished urban sites; poetics of memory; ethno-cultural; non-Muslim minorities; Turkish Republic; displacement; alterity; multiculturalism; minorities; literature; psychoanalytic model; difference; othering; intercultural; spatial

eBook

Published: September 15, 2020
ISBN: 9781644694435