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Author ORCID Identifier
N/A
AccessType
Open Access Dissertation
Document Type
dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Program
Comparative Literature
Year Degree Awarded
2016
Month Degree Awarded
February
First Advisor
Catherine Portuges
Second Advisor
Don Eric Levine
Third Advisor
Ela Gezen
Fourth Advisor
Asuman Suner Zontul
Subject Categories
Comparative Literature | Film and Media Studies | German Literature | Other Languages, Societies, and Cultures
Abstract
Fatih Akın's feature films Head-On (2004) and The Edge of Heaven (2007) resonated strongly with Turkish, German and Turkish German communities, albeit for diverse reasons, opening spaces for debate with regard to subjectivites that foreground their alterity and redefine readings of national identity. This dissertation addresses ways in which the melodramatic modality of Akın's films partake in such debates by presenting a dialogic genealogy of melodramas from Turkish, German and Turkish German contexts. An analysis of Fontane's novel "Effi Briest" and of R.W Fassbinder's Fontane Effi Briest and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul; Atıf Yılmaz's O Beautiful Istanbul; and Yılmaz Güney's The Herd suggests ways in which these texts and films inscribe different aspects of alterity, situating the subjects of these narratives in disruptive relationships with national and transnational identitarian discourses. I examine these melodramatic narratives and the impasses they constructfor their subjects together with the relationship of the films' uses of mise-en-scène to further complicate notions of ethnic and other modes of belonging. Divergent modes of distanciation and identification from different filmic traditions in Turkey and in Germany constitute a multivalent nexus through which I approach Akın's films. The ambivalence of the protagonists' affective states sets up another point of critical inquiry from which I utilize notions of performativity to critique interiorized and exteriorized readings of affect. I trace articulations of the realistic registers in these works, seeking the fissures where the melodramatic modality reveals itself to allow the directors to leave open the subjects' alterity. Finally, I link certain plot-lines to the "stranded objects" of Turkish and German national histories, including histories pertaining to the Nazi past in Germany, the erasure of the Ottoman cosmopolitan cultural nexus and the nomadic modes of existence of the Kurdish population in Turkey. I then posit ways in which these objects come to interact with transnationally determined subjectivities in the films of Akın. The dialogic genealogy I propose intervenes in current critical debates on melodrama as a trans-generic mode and on transnationality in cinema that look beyond paradigms of nationalism(s) towards a diverse articulation of subjectivities that resist reification by dominant identitarian discourses.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/7944321.0
Recommended Citation
Benli, Emir O., "THE SUBJECTS OF FATİH AKIN'S MELODRAMAS: A GENEALOGICAL READING THROUGH THE FILMS OF R.W. FASSBINDER, YILMAZ GÜNEY AND ATIF YILMAZ" (2016). Doctoral Dissertations. 550.
https://doi.org/10.7275/7944321.0
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/550
Included in
Comparative Literature Commons, Film and Media Studies Commons, German Literature Commons, Other Languages, Societies, and Cultures Commons