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Tagged: novel

The “(Un)forgotten” Pandemic: The 1918 Influenza Virus in Turkish Literary Texts

By Seda Yucekurt. Why was the 1918 Influenza pandemic largely “forgotten”? The conceptualization of the pandemic as a catastrophic event is multifaceted, involving socio-historical and cultural dimensions. The potential answer lies in the observation, that it coincided with the final stages of the First World War, allowing for socio-historical interpretations based on this contextualization. Apart from the overshadowing effect of the First World War, as several resources indicate, the experiences of the 1918 pandemic may have faded from collective memory due to inadequate documentation and reporting. Does this oblivion or silence prevail in Turkish literature?

The Self-in-Crisis in the Contemporary Turkish Novel: A Case for the Relevance of Medical Humanities

By Burcu Alkan. This article examines the self-in-crisis in the Turkish novel, more specifically the origins and functions of “the psychiatric turn” in representations of madness in contemporary Turkish novels. It examines how the novelists engage with psychiatric medicine and discusses why such an engagement has become prominent in exploring existential crises in the novelistic imagination in recent years.

Moving Through Space, Sheltering Across Time: Alternate Realities in Contemporary Arabic Fiction of (Forced) Displacement

Annamaria Bianco’s contribution aims to show how Arab migration writings and future writings have increasingly ended up overlapping, in the wake of the “speculative turn” taken by contemporary fiction. Through a review of a few novels published after the so-called “refugee crisis” in 2015 and drawing on different studies as well as on the notion of “refugeedom”, the author will show how this literary genre juxtaposes the documentary function of prose with narrative strategies of estrangement and defamiliarization that aim to generate in the reader a desire to act on the present, to redeem the past and change the future of hospitality worldwide.

Literary (Re)Visions of Time in Eastern and Central Europe – Papers II

This blogpost is the second part of a summary of the contributions to the EUTIM conference “Time Out of Joint: Literary (Re)Visions of Time in Eastern and Central Europe”. At the centre of the event were were narratives of time and conceptualizations of history in Central and Eastern European poetry, novels, film, and drama.

Literary (Re)Visions of Time in Eastern and Central Europe – Papers I

At the centre of the EUTIM conference “Time Out of Joint: Literary (Re)Visions of Time in Eastern and Central Europe”, were narratives of time and conceptualizations of history in Central and Eastern European poetry, novels, film, and drama. The event featured some of the leading scholars of Belarusian, Crimean Tatar, Czech, Polish and Ukrainian literatures. This contribution is the first part of a dossier with the paper abstracts.