11
Archived Theses
0
DOIs Assigned
0%
DOI Rate
Discipline
Towards another ontology of performance
This thesis focuses on the concept of performance, specifically in its artistic modality, as a reflexive event through which an ontological examination of being can be actualized. Starting from a critique of current positioning of contemporary performance theory against mimetic structures, the thesis tries to negotiate the event-being of performance with its foundation on repetition and representation. French philosopher Jacques Derrida?s critique of Western metaphysics on the basis of the philosophy?s attack on writing and literature deeply informs and structures the thesis? critique of performance theory and its claims to presence, liveness and truth of the unmediated. In the final analysis, the thesis tries to read how performance is also co-opted by the media culture and art system it has criticized.
Reconstructing the city and the citizen through the Istanbul courses
This study investigates into the imagination of the city, specifically İstanbul and the projection of identity for the İstanbulite urban subject within the context of İstanbul courses. The courses, inspired by an educational project carried out as part of İstanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture, became part of the primary school curriculum for the state schools in İstanbul. A similar course, "City and Culture: İstanbul", was also designed to be offered as an elective for universities in the city. It is argued that the courses constitute an example of the consumer-capitalist ideology in the urban space and constitute one of the strategies of urban entrepreneurialism. They create and disseminate a normative discourse about the urban space with the help of the reproductive function of education. The thesis analyzes the course books in terms of the three criteria of "the world construct", "history" and "the urban citizen". It is argued that within the world construct that the courses project, İstanbul emerges as a postcard-city emptied out of its social and historical context for purposes of place marketing. History functions as a reservoir to contribute to this construct by providing myths concerning the city's past. In this context, the desirable urban citizen that the courses aim to bring about is imagined as spectator, a tourist and a tourist guide. The courses therefore enable the reproducing of the consumer-capitalist ideology in the urban space and raise the individuals that are properly integrated into it.
Formations of the body: Talal Asad and the secular
The present study aspires to read Talal Asad's Genealogies of Religion and Formations of the Secular not as works of anthropology of religion, but as one major contribution to body studies. The novelty of this thesis lies in its argument that Asad's reflections on the religious and the secular in two separate works comprise in fact one theory of the body. Asad's critique of the concepts of the secular and the religion is the ground upon which his theory of the body is constructed. His genealogy of the attitudes towards the body via the changing juridical practices in the European Middle Ages is Asad's treatment of bodily pain in the economy of truth. Asad's theory of the body is complemented with the examination of modern conceptions of agency, pain, and cruelty with regards to the concept of the secular and secularism. Accompanying this reading of Asad, this study is to maintain that "the religious" and "the secular" as opposites are but the products of modern thinking; that "the secular" precedes "secularism"; and, most importantly, that Asad deconstructs the binary opposition of "the religious" and "the secular" within the horizon of the body. Reading the shifts in the attitudes towards and understandings of the body especially in the history of Christianity, Asad develops a theory of the body. I attempt in this thesis as a consequence to introduce body studies to Talal Asad's theory of the body.
Fans by proxy: Cross-cultural media fandom in Turkey
A "fan" can be anyone, from a regular viewer of a TV show, to a fan fiction writer, a collector, or an obsessive consumer. "Fandom", therefore, is a community of these myriad of fans with their myriad of ways to interact with the text and each other. This study investigates the cross-cultural media fandom in Turkey and how -within a global context- Turkish media fans interact with the global media products in a different cultural, social and linguistic spheres. To investigate this community, this study relies on semi-structured interviews conducted with cross-cultural media fans in Turkey, who are urban middle-class young adults. The findings of the interviews are analyzed in five main topics: the fans share a specific kind of aesthetic attachment to the object of their fandom, they practice code-switching, they form a community by a sense of belonging and digital socialization processes, they show resistance toward the mass consumerism and Turkish popular culture, and they reject fandoms in their vernacular culture. All these practices render this group of people a community of practice, and these practices and dispositions are investigated within the light of the findings of the interviews.
The cosmopolitanization of culinary "consumption": Steakhouses as instances of the culture industry
This thesis is one of the firsts in Turkish context and literature in analyzing how culture industry and transforms culinary consumption into a cosmopolitan practice through steakhouses. Using the methods of thematic analysis and discourse analysis, the data collected from 40 interviewees including both the people who have been to steakhouses and who have been not has been theoretically and practically analyzed. As a result, it has been observed that steakhouses have an expert, western-connoting, and socioeconomically high perception in the eyes of the consumers; and this perception promoted by culture industry has been observed to be reproduced in popular discourse. Furthermore, steakhouses have been concluded to be effectively-functioning ideological instruments of culture industry operating in the co-existence of cosmopolitanism, globalization, and capitalism by selling perceptions full of associations symbolizing better life standards and high-level capitals. It has also been found that in addition to the primary and secondary functions of eating as existing theories suggest, dining-out at steakhouse can also be regarded as a tertiary activity in which people try for meaning-making via symbolic performance activities through which they continue to spend money, construct ideal identities, and buy cultural products such as high-SES experience.
The representation of class-inflected masculinity in contemporary Turkish cinema
This study aims to analyse the representation of masculinity, with a specific focus on disentangling the relationship between masculinity and class in contemporary Turkish cinema, by exploring four movies that have been produced during the last decade and received international recognition. It borrows the concept of hegemonic masculinity to characterize and locate the kinds of masculinities that are represented in the films Winter Sleep (Kış Uykusu) (2014) and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Bir Zamanlar Anadolu'da) (2011) by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Majority (Çoğunluk) (2010) by Seren Yüce and Beyond the Hill (Tepenin Ardı) (2012) by Emin Alper. Pierre Bourdieu's formulation of cultural and symbolic capital is also employed to demonstrate class denominators. Consequently, the thesis merges practices that stem from class status with masculinities, in order to locate them at the very juncture of class and gender. Through this conceptualization, this study argues that there are certain notions that are intrinsic to class statuses which are incorporated with gender, specifically masculinity. From this perspective, class status is intrinsic to the mode of masculinity in gender relations as depicted in these representative films from the canon of contemporary Turkish cinema.
Oğuz Atay'ın Tehlikeli Oyunlar'ında trajik düşünce: Kimlik, kültür ve tarih
This work discusses how Oğuz Atay's Tehlikeli Oyunlar calls the notions of identity, culture, and history into question from the standpoint of tragic thought. The term "tragic thought" is derived from Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet's main thesis that ancient Greek tragedy entails a form of critical (re)thinking in which human being and human action are interpreted as riddles and problems ridden with ambiguities, tensions, and contradictions evading definitive solutions. In ancient Greek tragedy, the notion of identity comes across as a pursuit of self-understanding while the concepts of history and culture are taken from a critical standpoint concerning one's relation to his era in the prism of past, present, and future. To flesh out this critical core, I majorly concentrate upon the conflicts and double binds at play in Tehlikeli Oyunlar with respect to notions of identity, history, and culture understood as such. With an interdisciplinary approach, I examine how Atay's tragic thought articulates the conundrums and paradoxes inherent in his own historical and cultural milieu and sheds light on the unmasterable contingencies and conflicts defining human condition. By demonstrating that pre-established structures and narratives do not provide satisfying answers to restless human search, I claim that Tehlikeli Oyunlar ultimately brings about the question of crisis. The concluding remarks illustrate that the crisis comes across as the experience of the vanishing of ground upon which one constructs his sense of identity in course of his pursuit of self-understanding and establishes his historical and cultural framework of relation to the self and the world.
Authorship in the culture industry: Azra Kohen's series of novels fi, çi, and pi
This study is an attempt to place the contemporary author somewhere between literature and the media culture of our day. On the best-seller shelves since 2014 when it was first published, Azra Kohen's trilogy Fi, Çi, Pi has been frequently subjected to discussions in Turkish literature. As a result, the writer has become a popular figure who has been invited to television shows, universities, newspaper interviews since then. The story narrated in the trilogy also promised such rating for a production company that three years after its first publication, it was adapted to screen as internet series. This master thesis analyses Kohen's contradictory attitude as a writer regarding the appearances in media and the series adaptation: while claiming that her only concern is to change the world, the writer comments on her authorship as frequently as possible. This ambivalent perception of (non) authorship is analysed in the light of literary, cultural and critical theories applied to the trilogy and the appearances in the media. In addition to a psychoanalytic glance at the characters, the issues of corruption, fame and beneficial relationships in business and media platforms are comparatively analysed both in the trilogy and its screen adaptation. The reasons the changes in the process of adaptation are discussed in the light of cultural theory. The result of this study shows that Kohen's idealistic intentions are challenged by capitalistic motives throughout the process.
Kadiköy rock culture as an affectual environment in transition
This thesis takes an ecomusicological approach to analyzing Kadıköy rock culture as an affectual environment in transition. Kadıköy rock culture is examined as an ecosystem and the relationship between space, music, and affects is discussed as a significant component of the states of co-vibration and co-existence. The participants of the in-depth interviews, who are members of this ecosystem, co-exist within the cultural environment of Kadıköy rock culture, and subsequently experience an intense sense of belonging to a community. This sense of belonging is often expressed in the form of a home narrative, which was one of the major themes in the interviews. Kadıköy's affectual character and the centrality of the home narrative manifest themselves in the discourses and narratives on the rock culture. I argue that sounds and affects are of utmost important in the transformation of the home narrative into shared emotions within this cultural environment. The transition of Kadıköy rock culture into a new phase along with the larger social transformations was a turning point from which new affects and certain emotional states emerged. Regarding that, the different conceptualizations of the home by nostalgia and solastalgia provide important insights about a fundamental ontological problem that has also been discussed in ecomusicological approaches Ecomusicological theorists have identified this ontological problem as a misconceived separation between nature and culture. I argue that such a misperception creates the fear of losing the home in Kadıköy rock culture as well and that this fear can replaced and alleviated with the notion of sustainability.
Konumlandırılmış öznelikler: An Atlas of The Difficult World ve Afiş'te toplumsal cinsiyet ve yaşayan beden
This thesis investigates whether feminist critical discourse analysis (FCDA) could be applied to poetry via the notion of lived body (corps vivant), as opposed to the conventional methods of poetry analysis which centralize male-oriented post-Cartesian subjecthoods based on rationale, transcendental agency, and coherency. It embraces lived body as a central theme in the poems and abandons the conventions of poetry analysis which have regarded poems as separate works, unaffected by the geographical and chronological locatedness the poets. With the aid of Elizabeth Grosz's corporeal feminism which adapts the notion of lived body, the thesis applies feminist critical discourse analysis to explore the poetry collections An Atlas of the Difficult World and Afiş [Poster], published by Adrienne Rich (US) and Sennur Sezer (Turkey), respectively. Identifying the common discursive categories in the books as corporeality of subjecthoods and locatedness of subjecthoods within a community, the thesis suggests that together with FCDA, (feminist) lived body provides feminist scholars the grounds to approach poetry as a cultural text and identify the discursive methods in poetry to defy patriarchal power relations.
Contested landscapes of belonging at the Turkish-Syrian border: the (re) making of Antakya and Defne
Based on the new metropolitan municipality system (Law No. 6360) Hatay, a multicultural province located at the Turkish-Syrian border, has undergone major cartographic changes. During this process, Defne has been crafted out of Antakya city as an ethnically and religiously segregated district. In this ethnographic study, I analyze the sociopolitical implications of this process. I examine how and why the Alawite and Christian Arab communities that identify themselves as indigenous peoples of Antakya have found themselves in the newly mapped Defne. I demonstrate how and through what spatial and identity practices these indigenous communities and key political stakeholders compete over the cultural heritage of Hatay and Antakya. Doing so, I aim to reveal the power relations behind the new cartography for Hatay while witnessing and documenting Antakya's (re)make and Defne's metamorphosis into the built and imaginary landscapes of the nation at the Turkish-Syrian border. My research has shown that Defne, now with its non-Sunni population, stands as a sign of difference and segregation in Hatay's new ethno-sectarian landscape, in contrast to Antakya, which has been Sunnified due to recent official districting practices. Nonetheless, the very same place (Defne) has proven to be a new public sphere for Hatay's Arab Alawites to negotiate their local identity by appropriating its space for political and communal engagements.