Projections of corporatism in Turkish novel of the Republican Period

Some aspects and experiences of corporatism, which was an economic organization and an ideology, and an apparatus for regulating society as well, have an important role in history. We encounter more recent debates and practices of corporatism, which indirectly came to the fore in the pre-modern period, in modernization experiences. Such experiences and debates, especially seen in Europe, were carried to different geographies over time and spread from the center to the periphery. These debates were started in Turkey, especially during the Constitutional Period, led by Ziya Gökalp. Gökalp's corporatist vision, which intended to organize and regulate the society with a system based on a solidaristic and economist logic, was started to implement both in economic policies and politics as well as in cultural life and literature with the proclamation of the Republic. That was a period of quest in which many political movements affected the country's agenda and cultural life in an eclectic way. Corporatism, as one of the trends in this period and with the solutions that envisioned to be generated, was also adopted in some levels of administrative and social life. One of the ways to make this phenomenon widespread has been cultural means, especially literature. In this study, it is aimed to examine the literary texts that consider corporatism as a set of methods in the society-building and an aspect of historical developments. And the traces of the corporatist elements in the literature, which were an active component of the building process, especially in the early phase of the Republic, is examined and interpreted. In the selected texts, it is aimed to determine how corporatism transformed in the genre of novel, which is expected to consider aesthetic value as its primary goal. The motivations behind this transformation, the instrumentalization of a literary text, the relationship of the offers by corporatism in a historical period with facts and the analysis of aforementioned offers through concrete cases, and their reflections on the literary level are interpreted. Furthermore, historical references, the role of concepts such as commitment, instrumentalization and functionality in indoctrinating an ideology in utopian texts, which can be read as a system and policy proposal, is analyzed. In addition to these, the historical context of the proposals of aforementioned ideologically predominant texts is examined, and the appearance of corporatism in the history of Turkish literature is illustrated with texts that focus particularly on this concept and expand it with fictional possibilities.