The Image of the Intellectual in Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu's Works
Citation
Thesis
I want to examine the image of the intellectual in Yakup Kadri's novels, whose stories coincide with, and are the very site of the narration of the Turkish nation.
Methodology
lays the ground with a lot of Bakhtin and Bhaba
traces how the intellectual narrates and perceives national history through three novels.
Key Terms
-the intellectual
- epic/novel
-pedagogic function : representing national unity
-performative function: representing subjects in their daily lives.
Criticisms and Questions
-does not have a clear argument, however offers lots of great material and paths to go down for further research. Karaosmanoğlu seems sort of like the proto-typical example of what the Turkish intellectual, interested in peasantry, should not do.
Notes
- By Homi Bhabha's account, the essential problem that engenders the narration of the nation is the lack of correspondence between the two conceptions of the people as "objects" and "subjects." The nation's story is an attempt to reconcile these two points.
- monumental/recursive time
Bakhtin - epic is eternal, novel is world in the making
- writers like Ziya Pasha, Çinasi and Namik Kemal, worked to popularize ideals such as freedom, nationhood and constitutional government, became example for Yusuf Kadri.
-Karaosmanoglu's works start as novels about individuals in crisis, but end up as epics about idealized public heroes.
- This desire for escape from reality, which is compounded by an elitist worldview, is characteristic of the intellectuals under the despotic reign of Abdülhamit II. e proclamation of the Second Constitution in 1908. Inner subjectivities explored by the Servet-i Fünun literature offer a good example of dreamed of creating a utopie earthly paradise called Green Nation ( Ye§il yurt) this escape from an uncontrollable and bitter reality. Servet-i Fünun authors such as Halid Ziya, Mehmed Rauf, Hüseyin Cahit, etc..
- Yakup Kadri originally pursued an art for art's sake approach, learned French to be familiar with the inspirations of Servet-i Funun.
- Berna Moran shows the kadrocu ideology behind Yakup Kadri's attitude - that is, the belief that the ignorant public had to be led and illuminated by the authoritarian figure of the intellectual for the internalization.
-Fathi Naci criticizes that in "Ankara" the word democracy does not appear:
"Yakup Kadri, who takes optimism to ridiculous extremes in every other context, cannot bear the idea that people govern themselves."