East-West entanglements : Pamuk, Özdamar, Derrida

• Main Author: Meliz, Ergin
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2010
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/22480

In my dissertation titled East-West Entanglements: Pamuk, Özdamar, Derrida, I analyze the representation of cultural, linguistic, and religious tensions chronicled by these authors who have variously inhabited Western and non-Western worlds. They all problematize the complicated relations between memory and identity within and without the borders of the modem nation state. I argue that their works address existing multicultural situations, which arise from diverging and converging histories, and remind us that we can no longer inhabit segregated states of being. In the face of multi-referential modes of living in the 2lst century, these authors suggest malleable and hybrid readings of entangled collectivities. Attention to the entanglements that overwhelm temporal, linguistic, and cultural boundaries is salutary, because it challenges the conceptual model based on mutually exclusive dichotomies, and calls into play the network of filiations that generate an ongoing interaction among conflicting singularities. I propose that Pamuk, Özdamar, and Derrida accommodate the ever-shifting ways of interaction on the levels of both content and form. They offer examples of grafted genre that accentuate the resemblances in difference across various generic forms. The grafted narratives they construct supersede and re-formulate the permeable boundaries between self and other, and call attention to the many Easts and Wests, enmeshed as they are in one another.