Turkish and Latin American World Literature Encounters

This thesis examines a corpus of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Turkish and Latin American literature in an attempt to offer fresh and innovative comparative avenues for non-Eurocentric world literature encounters. Through a multilayered analytical approach encompassing a transhistorical, transnational, and translational framework, I scrutinise Turkish-Latin American literary relations by focussing on a selection of texts that intertwine political critiques with fantastic, magical realism, gothic, surrealist, and magical realist modes. I investigate how divergent complex writings acquire and negotiate world literature status by shedding light on the visible manifold intersections between Turkish and Latin American productions. The thesis is further enriched by theoretical insights drawn from socio-cultural historiographies, aesthetics of narratology, world literature, translation, circulation, and reception, benefitting from the theories proposed by David Damrosch, Pascale Casanova, Lawrence Venuti, Emily Apter, Francesca Orsini, and Mariano Siskind, among them, as well as concepts from the discipline of translation studies.

The selected Turkish and Latin American primary sources for this study include: Gabriel García Márquez's Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude), César Aira's Los fantasmas (2009; Ghosts) and La villa (2001; Shantytown), Latife Tekin's Sevgili Arsız Ölüm (2001; Dear Shameless Death) and Berci Kristin Çöp Masalları (1984; Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills), Mariana Enríquez's Los cosas perdimos en el fuego (2017; Things We Lost in the Fire), Elif Şafak/Shafak's İskender (2012; Honour), Roberto Bolaño's 'El gaucho insufrible' (2003; 'The Insufferable Gaucho') and Orhan Pamuk's Masumiyet Müzesi (2008; The Museum of Innocence).

The primary sources I consider in this thesis are inherently plural and accommodate multiple languages, countries, and origins, and they lend themselves exceptionally well to persistent instances of relationality. Even though the primary sources mentioned in the thesis comprise texts translated into English, I adhere to their original languages in my close readings and quoted passages. Through a meticulous examination of these texts, I intend to bring two regions, Turkey and Latin America, into fruitful dialogue to explore how Turkish and Latin American authors juxtapose the real with the magical realism, fantastic, gothic, and surreal to uncover the historical and socio-political tensions, instabilities, and controversies of their countries.