Abstract:

Tutunamayanlar (The Disconnected, 2016) is the text of Turgut Özben’s transformation through his readings of what Selim Işık left after his death. This transformation can be read as the reflection of astonishment and despair of Turkey people’s collective unconscious towards the flashy pace of the Republican Modernization. Oğuz Atay provides his protagonist Özben with the contextualization of alienation corresponds with practices of Turkey’s late-Modernization through the texts of his dead friend. Within the context, late Westernization and the roots of Westernization which are grounded upon capitalist Modernity and its intellectual infrastructure, the left-winger intellectuals of the1960s Turkey who grounds upon their ideology upon Kemalist discourse, the nationalist doctrine of history and its icons appear as the derogated targets of Atay through irony and parody. However, the prominent factor in the critical approach to the text is the reduction of it within the criticism of Kemalist authoritarianism. Atay’s criticism targets Modernity altogether with all institutions, foundations, and intellectual infrastructure. From Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s perspective, Özben’s experience becomes prominent as a nomadic elusion from the despotic-machines of capitalist-Modernity which strengthens itself by the Bakhtinian dialogic polyphony of carnivalesque that results as the construction of “schizo-subject”. In this study, Özben’s transformation is analyzed according to the deterritorialization concept of Deleuze and Guattari, and the formal deterritorialization of the text is examined by drawing a correspondence between Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of carnivalesque and dialogism as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualizations. 

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