İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı Bölümü Yayın Koleksiyonu

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12416/419

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Things are changing under the skin of England”: Representation of Immigrant Encounters in Hanif Kureishi’s ‘Borderline
(Albanian Society for the Study of English, 2017) Koç, Ertuğrul; Demir, Y.; Demir, Yağmur; 6497; 30410; İngilizce Mütercimlik ve Tercümanlık; İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı
This paper analyses Hanif Kureishi’s lesser known play Borderline (1981). In this work, written under the influence of 1980 Southall Riots, Kureishi addresses the problems of immigrants living in England and depicts how the idea of Englishness is challenged by the immigrants who are engaged in racist politics, suffer from identity crisis, and strive to gain a sense of belonging. Both first-generation and second generation immigrants who are unable to feel the sense of belonging in the host land (England) are depicted as occupying in-between spaces. A portrait of an immigrant Pakistani family, each member of which goes through different stages of adjusting themselves to the society they have joined is presented along with other immigrant characters in the play. To fight with the injustice and racial abuse, a group of second-generation immigrants establish an organisation called Asian Youth Movement. Although it is implied that England and English people are not ready yet to embrace other cultures, immigrants, especially second generation immigrants, endeavour to make England “habitable.” In the play, Pakistani immigrants are portrayed as subject to certain changes during the integration process, which in the long-term will have permanent effects on English national identity, culture and society. This paper aims to display how immigrants (despite being considered a threat) try to overcome the difficulties they face in the host land, and in the meantime inevitably make a change in the English culture. © Albanian Society for the Study English (ASSE).
Vampire versus the empire: Bram Stoker's reproach of fin-de-siecle Britain in dracula
(Cambridge Univ. Press., 2018) Koç, Ertuğrul; Demir, Yağmur; 6497; 30410; İngilizce Mütercimlik ve Tercümanlık; İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı
Much has been said about Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), the out-of-tradition exemplar of the Gothic which, perhaps, has had a more pervasive effect on our understanding of life and death, gender roles and identity, and sex and perversity than any other work of the genre. The vampire from the so-called dark ages has become a symbol standing for the uncontrollable powers acting on us and also for all the discarded, uncanny phenomena in human nature and history. The work, however, has usually been taken by the critics of Gothic literature as “a paradigmatic Gothic text” (Brewster 488) representing the social, psychological, and sexual traumas of the late-nineteenth century. Hence, it has been analysed as a work “breaking [the] taboos, [and in need of being] read as an expression of specifically late Victorian concerns” (Punter and Byron 231). The text has also been seen as “reinforc[ing] readers’ suspicions that the authorities (including people, institutions and disciplines) they trust are ineffectual” (Senf 76). Yet, it has hardly ever been taken as offering an alternative Weltanschauung in place of the decaying Victorian ethos. True, Dracula is a fin-de-siècle novel and deals with the turbulent paradigmatic shift from the Victorian to the modern, and Stoker, by creating the lecherous vampire and his band as the doppelgängers of the sexually sterile and morally pretentious bourgeois types (who are, in fact, inclined to lascivious joys), reveals the moral hypocrisy and sexual duplicity of his time. But, it is also true that by juxtaposing the “abnormal” against the “normal” he targets the utilitarian bourgeois ethics of the empire: aware of the Victorian pragmatism on which the concept of the “normal” has been erected, he, with an “abnormal” historical figure (Vlad Drăculea of the House of Drăculești, 1431–76) who appears as Count Dracula in the work, attacks the ethical superstructure of Britain which has already imposed on the Victorians the “pathology of normalcy” (Fromm 356). Hence, Stoker's choice of title character, the sadistic Vlad the Impaler, who fought against the Ottoman Empire in the closing years of the Middle Ages, and his anachronistic rendering of Dracula as a Gothic invader of the Early Middle Ages are not coincidental (Figure 8). In the world of the novel, this embodiment of the early and late paradigms is the antagonistic power arrayed against the supposedly stable, but in reality fluctuating, fin-de-siècle ethos. However, by turning this personification of the “evil” past into a sexual enigma for the band of men who are trying to preserve the Victorian patriarchal hegemony, Stoker suggests that if Victorian sterile faith in the “normal” is defeated through a historically extrinsic (in fact, currently intrinsic) anomaly, a more comprehensive social and ethical epoch that has made peace with the past can be started.

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