The Impossibility of Return: Güney Dal and the Exilic Condition

Authors

  • Mert Bahadir Reisoğlu Koç University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5399/uo/konturen.11.0.4816

Abstract

This article examines the role exile plays in the works of the first generation of Turkish German authors by focusing on Güney Dal. The first part of the article deals with Güney Dal’s interviews with other Turkish German authors in 1983. Even though the authors interviewed by Dal do not consider themselves exiles, I show that exilic consciousness is marked not only by the impossibility of returning home, a condition that the authors interviewed deny sharing with exiles, but also by the fact that the exilic subject is already displaced within and is as such unable to be at home. In the second part, I interpret Dal’s novel Eine Kurze Reise nach Gallipoli (1994), which he wrote after moving back to Turkey, as a work that showcases this insurmountable uprootedness and argue that Dal’s modernist novel shows that the disintegration of exilic consciousness can establish a link with political and ethical issues beyond the reach of the isolated and paranoid subject.

Author Biography

Mert Bahadir Reisoğlu, Koç University

Mert Bahadır Reisoğlu is an assistant professor in Comparative Literature at Koç University. He completed his Ph.D. at New York University with his dissertation on Turkish German literature and media technologies and published on Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Orhan Pamuk and Friedrich Kittler. His research interests are Turkish-German literature and cinema, contemporary German literature and theater, media theory, modernism and the avant-garde.

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Published

2020-12-09

How to Cite

Reisoğlu, M. B. (2020). The Impossibility of Return: Güney Dal and the Exilic Condition. Konturen, 11, 83–99. https://doi.org/10.5399/uo/konturen.11.0.4816