KHAS CORE Talks – Dr. Selen Erdoğan

KHAS CORE Talks series continues with Dr. Selen Erdoğan‘s speech entitled “Bilge Karasu’s Queer Modernism”.

You can follow the speech on Tuesday, April 12 at 20:00 on Zoom.

Registration is required for this meeting. Please fill the registration form in advance.

Abstract: In this talk, Selen Erdoğan will discuss Bilge Karasu’s literary contributions to queer thought. Karasu’s works disrupt the heterosexual matrix through modernist forms of narration and constitute literary takes on critical concepts of queer theory. Centering on a close reading of his first published book, Death in Troy, the talk will examine how childhood trauma, normative violence, and doymamışlık as an affective burden guide his writing. The talk proposes to read the text as a queer modernist novel by tending to the contradictory entanglement of pleasure with feeling unfulfilled/ungratified, playfulness with violence, and reparation with trauma. Karasu himself uses the term doymamışlık to describe queer affects and alludes to an ayrı dil (distinct language) spoken by those cast aside by the heterosexual and conjugal order of modern society. From the margins of this conjugal order, the talk argues, Karasu builds a queer modernist style.

About the Speaker: Selen Erdoğan received her Ph.D. in Turkish Language and Literature from Boğaziçi University in 2021. Her dissertation is titled Writing from the Closet: Bilge Karasu’s Queer Modernism. Her work examines how Bilge Karasu’s fiction contributes to queer theory by transgressing the heterosexual matrix and Karasu’s dialogue with significant works of modernism. She spent the 2018-2019 academic year in the United States as a Fulbright Researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s Comparative Literature Department. Between 2015 and 2021, she worked as a part-time lecturer at Sabancı University, where she taught Turkish literary modernism in English and Turkish. She was a visiting lecturer at Kadir Has University’s Core Program until recently. She published articles, book chapters, essays, and reviews in journals, including New Perspectives on Turkey, Journal of Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, Bir+Bir, and Notos. During the 2022-23 academic year, she will be a visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies.