Papers by Merve Sarıkaya-Şen
Women: A Cultural Review, 2023
In this article, I discuss Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness (2020) as an eco-feminist critical dys... more In this article, I discuss Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness (2020) as an eco-feminist critical dystopia that presents the precarious nature of human lives connected with the more-than-human world. The novel achieves this through Bea and Agnes’s journey from the City to the Wilderness that is mainly constructed by balancing utopian and dystopian elements and thus offering a critical look at our contemporary world under the risk of climate change. While doing this, the novel reminds readers of the interdependent relation between nature and human beings who tend to forget nature but try to meet the demands of the post-industrial capitalist world. In addition, the novel portrays Bea and Agnes as strong women who can challenge systems of power and patriarchy and present the possibility of a change that would heal the wounds of the climate crisis at least to a certain extent. At the same time, however, they need to go beyond patriarchal definitions of being a mother and a daughter by caring for their individual needs and showing their self-determination in deciding on their present and future lives. Thus, this article demonstrates that the novel presents not only a powerful warning to readers about the possible calamities of environmental degradation but also a glimpse of hope in its female characters.
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Eds. Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau. Transcending the Postmodern: The Singular Response of Literature to the Transmodern Paradigm. New York: Routledge, 177-192. , 2020
Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) presents the suffering of hijras, militan... more Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) presents the suffering of hijras, militants, political activists and victims of religious and political tensions in India as well as their resilience through the healing power of solidarity, interconnectedness and love. The novel thus partially qualifies as a transmodern narrative which puts the voice of subaltern subjects into words and presents their interconnectedness in a world of tolerance and re-enchantment. Accordingly, this chapter first demonstrates how the novel presents the vulnerable lives of wounded hijras and animals against the destructive practices of capitalism and consumerism. In doing so, the novel constructs a transmodern cultural world of India which defends life against capitalist tendencies and privileges the lives of wounded animals and subjects left without any kind of consolation. This chapter then moves on to demonstrate how the novel draws attention to the individual singularities of political and religious victims in India whose vulnerability paradoxically becomes a source of spirituality and solidarity. The chapter finally analyses the narrative form of the novel and discusses how it achieves truthful communication by combining fictional and non-fictional components.
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Journal Article, 2021
In this article I discuss Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other (2019) as a transmodern narrat... more In this article I discuss Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other (2019) as a transmodern narrative that gives voice to a marginalised group of black women living in Britain. Written in a hybrid style that combines prose and poetry and eschewing punctuation and long sentences, the novel interweaves sundry stories from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century set in countries ranging from Africa, the Caribbean, and America to Britain. This networked structure exposes transtemporal and transnational patterns of diversity, connectedness and relationality, as well as the distinctive genealogy of black British women and their maternal empowerment. I argue that the resilience of the characters in the face of social, racial and gender marginalisation springs from their empathic relatedness and solidarity. This emphasis on the importance of care for the other highlights the need for improving not only women’s rights and socioeconomic opportunities but of benefiting humanity on a broader scale.
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Book Reviews by Merve Sarıkaya-Şen
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journal volumes, CUJHSS ISSN 1309-6761 by Merve Sarıkaya-Şen
Çankaya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2021
We are honored to present the 15/1 issue of Çankaya University Journal of Humanities and Social S... more We are honored to present the 15/1 issue of Çankaya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences. As in our earlier issues, in this issue of the volume too, we have maintained our efforts in adhering to and reaching the goals of academic discussion. We continue to cover interdisciplinary studies at the intersection of different areas of the human sciences that fall within the scope of the Journal and to share new perspectives in the humanities. This current issue is coming out during the time of a devastating pandemic. It responds to the global loss of many lives caused by Covid-19 by giving place to a discussion of Thanatos, the fear of death and our final surrender to it in dignity. The discussion is pursued in different articles in this volume through a diversity of texts. The issue includes highly stimulating articles also on such hot topics as African Migrant Mothers, trauma narrative, “making America great again,” and the concepts of authority and authenticity in creative writing, and a wide variety of literary texts from different periods such as Clarke’s Childhood’s End, Shafak’s Pinhan, DeLillo’s The Body Artist, Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry, Rooney’s Normal People, Barnes’s Nothing to be Frightened Of and Flaubert’s Parrot, Thackeray’s The Rose and The Ring, Sabahattin Ali’s “Melancholy,” and Poe’s “The Imp of the Perverse”. These and a myriad of other canonical texts are discussed from inventive angles in the issue articles. We are sure our readers will enjoy observing the many-sided analyses taking place in these articles, and we hope the present volume will be of interest for scholars and stimulate further research.
The editor-in-chief would like to thank all the authors wholeheartedly for their scholarly contributions and for their collaborations throughout. I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to our referees for their reviews and valuable comments.
MK, editor, mkirca@gmail.com
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Papers by Merve Sarıkaya-Şen
Book Reviews by Merve Sarıkaya-Şen
journal volumes, CUJHSS ISSN 1309-6761 by Merve Sarıkaya-Şen
The editor-in-chief would like to thank all the authors wholeheartedly for their scholarly contributions and for their collaborations throughout. I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to our referees for their reviews and valuable comments.
MK, editor, mkirca@gmail.com
The editor-in-chief would like to thank all the authors wholeheartedly for their scholarly contributions and for their collaborations throughout. I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to our referees for their reviews and valuable comments.
MK, editor, mkirca@gmail.com