On Guard Against Contamination: Espionage, Conspiracism, and Imperial Nostalgia in British and Turkish Literature
[Thesis]
Tatar, Doruk
Ziarek, Ewa P.
State University of New York at Buffalo
2019
246 p.
Ph.D.
State University of New York at Buffalo
2019
This dissertation, On Guard Against Contamination: Espionage, Conspiracism, and Imperial Nostalgia in British and Turkish Literatures, is a comparative study of British spy fiction and conspiracist styles in Turkish literature, and treats them as compensatory tales in response to the geopolitical and ideological crises of the two countries, namely Britain and Turkey in the twentieth century. This way of reading such literary examples goes hand in hand with the theoretical problematization of the entangled ties among literature, entertainment, politics, and aesthetics. Imperial loss is a point of contact between the cultural scenes of Britain and Turkey, and espionage and conspiracism are the two dominant responses to this crisis in the two countries' national literatures. Conventional spy fiction stories are compensatory tales of "entertainment" about the imperial and post-imperial crises of Britain that disavow various forms of "contaminations" such as antagonisms inherent to the empire and nation, racial difference, and the homeland-colony separation. "Serious" works of spy fiction, on the other hand, address such themes as contamination in a more direct fashion while using irony in order to distance themselves from "entertainment" and their novel contents. The nationalist-conservative strain of conspiracism, as the Turkish counterpart to British spy fiction, brings feelings of anxiety, resentment, and alertness required by the state-oriented politics and its notions of political threat into the heart of Turkish literature. On the other side, authors like Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar and Orhan Pamuk appropriate themes of conspiracism as a part of the literary strategy of establishing and maintaining the aesthetic autonomy of their texts in the face of politics.