Social and political witnesses in Memduh Şevket Esendal: Change and criticism

Memduh Şevket Esendal, a person who lived through the Late Ottoman and Early Republican periods, throughout his life story, he witnessed many radical breaking points at the national and global level, such as II. Constitutional Monarchy, National Struggle, War of Independence, Republic, Single-Party Period, Multi-Party Period, World War I and II. Of course, the most striking testimony is the Westernization-Modernization issue inherited from the Ottoman Empire to Turkey. It is possible to trace of the mentioned testimonies in the works of fiction and non-fiction written by the artist. In this study, it has been focused on how the author carried all these socio-political observations to the literary world, how he brought them into discussion within the possibilities provided by the fiction, in short, how he transformed all this vital experience into literary testimony. In this direction, first of all, various sections on Esendal's authorship were presented and thus a basis for the study was established. Immediately after, a dynamic and critical theoretical discussion was carried out, accompanied by basic concepts such as civilization, progress, backwardness, belatedness, cultural duality, hybridity, patching, snobbery, orphanhood, loss of identity and loss of values. When the works of Esendal, one of the transition period intellectuals, are examined in detail, it is seen that these concepts affect the texts either explicitly or implicitly. Therefore, the guidance of these concepts was needed in order to make convincing judgments about Esendal literature and to completely penetrate the deep structures of his texts. After the conceptual framework, all the works of the author, regardless of genre, were examined in the context of social and political testimony with close reading and content analysis techniques. During this examination, the vertical criticism method was adopted in order to reach beyond the generally accepted judgments. The anxiety of loss of identity that comes with the westernization process, the place and role of women in this process; criticism oriented to religion, society, intellectuals; and bureaucracy criticism, which bears great traces of the author's political identity, are the main issues that have been scrutinized throughout the study.