Excavating Memory: Bilge Karasu's Istanbul and Walter Benjamin's Berlin(Ottoman and Turkish Studies)

This study moves the acclaimed Turkish fiction writer Bilge Karasu (1930–1995) into a new critical arena by examining his poetics of memory, as laid out in his narratives on Istanbul's Beyoğlu, once a cosmopolitan neighborhood called Pera. Karasu established his fame in literary criticism as an experimental modernist, but while themes such as sexuality, gender, and oppression have received critical attention, an essential tenet of Karasu's oeuvre, the evocation of ethno-cultural identity, has remained unexplored: Excavating Memory brings to light this dimension. Through his non-referential and ambiguous renderings of memory, Karasu gives in his Beyoğlu narratives unique expression to ethno-cultural difference in Turkish literature, and lets through his own repressed minority identity. By using Walter Benjamin's autobiographical work as a heuristic premise for illuminating Karasu, Gökberk establishes an innovative intercultural framework, which brings into dialogue two representative writers of the twentieth century over temporal and spatial distances.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Beginnings: Reading Memory 2. From Berlin's Old West to Istanbul's Beyoğlu: Narratives of Memory, Narratives of Lost Topographies 3. Incompleteness as Anti-Autobiography: The Production and Publication Histories of Benjamin's and Karasu's Memory Narratives 4. Bilge Karasu in Historical Context: Identity Formation in the Shadow of "Turkification" 5. Forgetting, Remembering, and the Workings of Collective Memory: Survival and the Retrieval of Memory Traces 6. "Dialectical Images" in Beyoğlu's Black Waters: The Photograph as Testimony 7. Remembering as Distortion: Visual and Aural Traces of Alterity 8. Spatiality as the Inscription of the Past 9. Crazy Meryem as the Saint of Beyoğlu's Marginalized: Toward a Final Reading of Difference Conclusion Addendum: Biographical Notes on Bilge Karasu References Index

About the Author :
lker Gkberk is Professor Emerita of German and Humanities at Reed College. The methodology and themes of her scholarship have been largely inspired by the paradigm intercultural German Studies. In her publications she has focused on models of cultural encounter and on different facets of alterity. Gkberk has worked with texts by German authors, ranging from Thomas Mann to Siegfried Lenz, as well as with those by Turkish-German authors. Her publications on modern Turkish literature include essays on Orhan Pamuk and Bilge Karasu. Aesthetic representations of displacement remain an ongoing concern of Gkberk's critical inquiry.

Review :
"Excavating Memory by Ülker Gökberk is a distinctive work on Bilge Karasu’s Lağımlaranası ya da Beyoğlu. The book uses concepts derived from Walter Benjamin’s unconventional narratives on his Berlin childhood to reveal what Gökberk calls Karasu’s poetics of distortion: the stylistic ways through which Karasu’s writing works through his childhood memories and invokes the atmosphere of a bygone multicultural Beyoğlu. The book is strongest in applying Benjaminian concepts to read Lağımlaranası and shedding new light on Karasu’s inscriptions of alterity and uses of ambiguity as a literary method… All in all, Excavating Memory explains meticulously how Lağımlaranası is a testimonial to religious and ethnic alterity of the non-Muslim Beyoğlu residents. The book defines Karasu’s radical alterity with regard to his family background and it contributes to the theoretical framework of Karasu studies by using concepts that amplify this aspect of his works."–Selen Erdoğan, Kadir Has Üniversitesi, Zemin