Browsing by Author "Degirmencioglu, Nesrin"

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    Bondage Of ‘Independent’ Nations: Neo-Imperialism In Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s Petals Of Blood And Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People
    (Ankara Üniversitesi, 2024) Degirmencioglu, Nesrin
    According to Frantz Fanon, in the former colonies ''[i]ndependence does not bring a change of direction'' (1978, p. 100). In postcolonial era the ''national bourgeoisie discovers its historical mission as intermediary. As we have seen, its vocation is not to transform the nation but prosaically serve as a conveyor belt for capitalism, forced to camouage itself behind the mask of neocolonialism'' (1978, p. 100-101). In both Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Petals of Blood and Indra Sinha's Animal's People after independence, the colonialists are replaced by a national bourgeoisie who, without capital and economic power, become dependent on foreign investment. In both novels, the unprivileged poor are the victims of the neo-imperialist system which attracts multinational corporations to take advantage of low-cost land and cheap labour. Ngugi explores the subjectivity of African history as reected by Westerners by the dual narration of his novel, from a subjective and a relatively objective but complementary narrative voice. Neither the previous colonial domination nor the national bourgeoisie which replaces them represents the victims of the system. The narration of the novel from the perspective of Munira, who refuses the familial capitalist wealth by escaping to live in Ilmorog, successfully reects the contradictory concerns of the capitalists and the victims. In Animal's People, Sinha gives voice to the subaltern victims of the system by the rst-person narrative of Animal, who is one of the worst victims of the system. Sinha emphasizes the reality of his story by indicating each chapter as a tape recording and using a sharp, slangy, and witty language for Animal. Both novels give voice to the subaltern victims of the society, and they are milestones in the freeing of the unprivileged classes from the bondage of the dominating national and foreign powers.
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    Harold Pinter’s Aesthetics In The Making: From Handwritten Manuscripts To Drafts Moonlight And Ashes To Ashes
    (Ankara Üniversitesi, 2023) Degirmencioglu, Nesrin
    Martin Esslin emphasizes that ‘‘instead of being in suspense as to what will happen next, the spectators are, in the Theatre of the Absurd, put into suspense as to what the play may mean. This suspense continues even after the curtain has come down’’ (1960, p. 14). In accordance with Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdung effects, alienating the audience from the characters and urging him/her to think, question and respond to the events or the dialogues taking place on stage, Pinter’s plays — with all the obscurity and uncertainty the characters are caught in — endow their audiences with more than enough tools to become subjects in the meaning-making process of his plays. No matter whether Pinter’s works are categorized as modernist through his transformation of the audience into subjects or just like more recently categorized as postmodernist in the works of Austin Quigley and Mireia Aragay (2009), what enables Pinter to be categorized as both is the obscurity of the language that he uses, and particularly in case of postmodernism, just like Fredric Jameson’s assertion of the “breakdown in the signifying chain” (1984, p.71), the broken correlation between the signified and signifiers in the dialogues that Pinter uses, creates the effect of ambiguity in his works. Pinter, in parallel to these definitions, states that ‘‘If I’m being explicit, I’m failing’’ (qtd in Knowles, 2009, p. 75). Considering how important the creation of ambiguity and uncertainty in Pinter’s plays is, this essay focuses on the creation process of the Theatre of the Absurd in Pinter’s Moonlight and Ashes to Ashes by examining the handwritten and type scripted manuscripts available in the Harold Pinter Archive at the British Library (UK).