The Program in Cultures, Civilizations, and Ideas is pleased to announce the first talk in our fall semester Colloquium Series. Dr. Ceylan Köşker Bevington will present her work entitled: ” Domestic Transformations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in The Formative Years of the Turkish Republic.” We look forward to seeing you there.
Date: Thursday, December 5th
Time: 17:30-18:30
Location: G-236
Abstract:
This paper explores the impact of the Turkish Republic’s use of domestication strategies to aid the westernisation project by utilising Gérard Genette’s concept of hypertextuality. Through this theoretical lens, the domestication history of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) in the formative years of the Turkish Republic from 1928 to 1953 is assessed. By examining Ali Rıza Seyfi’s reworking of Dracula, entitled Kazıklı Voyvoda (Vlad the Impaler, 1928), and its cinematic adaptation, Drakula İstanbul’da (Dracula in Istanbul, 1953), this paper argues that the linguistic, diegetic, and pragmatic transpositions made in these Genetteian heterodiegetic hypertexts reveal an impulse towards a culturally specific form of domestic transformation. Moreover, it will be argued that domestic transformations occur within the field of literary adaptation when a state that has been subjected to imperial exploitation takes on the cultural artefacts of its coloniser and recreates them for purposes beyond those for which they were originally intended. Thus, rather than being direct translations or outlandish adaptations of Stoker’s Dracula, each piece that will be discussed in this paper represents a form of literary transformation that reveals complex interactions in regard to ideas surrounding cultural imperialism.
Bio:
Dr. Ceylan Köşker Bevington is an assistant professor in the department of English Language and Literature in Bilkent University. She received her PhD in English Literature from Aberystwyth University in 2017. She specializes in Victorian literature, with a particular focus on women’s writing, constructions of identity, periodical studies, and the cult of literary celebrity. Her monograph Violet Fane: The Literary Identities of a Nineteenth-Century Poet and Novelist was published by Edward Everett Root Publishers in 2021. In addition to her research into Fane’s life and writing, Dr Köşker Bevington is currently interested in gothic literature, mesmerism, and constructions of female identity.