KHAS CORE Talks – Dr. Doruk Tatar

The guest of the first event of the KHAS CORE Talks in the 2021-2022 Academic Year is Dr. Doruk Tatar from University at Buffalo, SUNY. You can follow Dr. Tatar’s speech titled “Coping with the Loss of Empire: British Spy Fiction and Turkish Literary Conspiracism” on Tuesday, November 2 at 20:00 on Zoom.

Zoom Meeting ID: 848 5255 9859 Password: 843148 

Rudyard Kipling’s famous novel Kim in 1901 marks the beginning of spy fiction as a popular literary genre. Since then, it has continued to flourish with contributions by prominent names of the twentieth-century British literature: Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Helen MacInnes, John Le Carré…

In the context of a decaying British Empire, spy fiction re-energized myths of empire, externalized internal problems and antagonisms via figures of enemies and traitors, and provided cognitive mappings of complex geopolitical relations for its audience. Though it is hard to designate a direct counterpart of British spy fiction in Turkish literature in the form of a coherent genre, “literary conspiracism” as a form of thinking fulfills similar ideological functions, albeit not without its particular traits.

With its “paranoid” and “reparative” attributes, Conspiracism characterizes nationalist-conservative works of literature, exemplified by Peyami Safa’s surgical alertness towards foreign cultural elements and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s permeable desire for cultural continuity. Aside from being a comparative study of British and Turkish literature, this research will discuss the role of entertainment and seriousness in literature and the interplay between the literary and the political.

Doruk Tatar received his BA in Political Science and International Relations at Boğaziçi University (2010) and his MA in Cultural Studies at Sabancı University (2012). He obtained his PhD degree in Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2019. His doctoral dissertation titled “On Guard Against Contamination: Espionage, Conspiracism, and Imperial Nostalgia in British and Turkish Literatures” focuses on the themes of espionage, paranoia, and conspiracy by looking at the different reactions given by Turkish and British literature to an imperial crisis. After completing his doctoral studies, he worked as a part-time lecturer in the Cultural Studies Department at Sabancı University. His research interests fall mainly in 20th century British and Turkish literature, continental philosophy and critical theory, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and crime fiction. His articles have been published in several journals and magazines such as Secrecy and Society, theory@buffalo, 221B Dergi, Birikim, Episode, IstanbuLab, and BUMED. He presented his research at universities in the USA, UK, and Turkey.