Traces of Eastern text in the narratives after 1980 in the context of intertextuality

The narrative begins with human history itself. Nowhere in the world is there a people without a narrative. This thesis, is based on the question of which myths and tales are constantly repeated in the post-1980 contemporary narrative and how these reiterated myths and tales are transformed in the post-1980 narratives. While starting our thesis, two ancient Eastern texts, which are frequently repeated in the works of Turkish literature with postmodern features, attracted our attention: The Epic of Gilgamesh and One Thousand and One Nights. While these two texts were rewritten in contemporary narratives after 1980, they were woven around three themes: storytelling, play and labyrinth. In addition, these narratives had another junction point: the construction process of the narrative. In these works, narrating the construction process of the narrative became the main aim of the fiction. In our thesis, we selected seven works in the post-1980 contemporary narrative, in which we identified this relationship. While examining One Thousand and One Nights, we discussed Hasan Ali Toptaş's novel Bin Hüzünlü Haz, İhsan Oktay Anar's novel Efrâsiyâb'ın Hikâyeleri and Murat Gülsoy's story called "Bize Kuş Dili Öğretildi". On the other hand, while examining the Epic of Gilgamesh, we discussed Özen Yula's novel Hayat Bir Kere, Sema Kaygusuz's narrative named Karaduygun, Murathan Mungan's story "Dumrul ile Azrail" and Zeynep Avcı's play Gılgamış. We examined our thesis within the framework of intertextuality theory. Intertextuality emphasizes that the text is not a closed structure and that the meaning is carried to infinity by constantly transferred to other texts. This endless game between texts leads the theory of intertextuality to the theory of déconstruction. While Mihail Bahtin says that there is no pure text, Gérard Genette emphasizes that all authors create only one book. Roland Barthes states that every text is an intertextual. Jacques Derrida says that the text establishes a relationship not only with the texts before it, but also with the texts after it. The existence of a text depends on other texts that come before and after it. One of the ways to deconstruct is to relocate parts of the text. In this context, while examining the works we have chosen, we have drawn attention to how the narratives are woven and disassembled, with which texts they relate and how they are transformed.