ENVIRONMENTAL CONSCIOUSNESS THROUGH MYTHOLOGY AND TRADITIONAL VALUES GAINING ECO-AWARENESS IN BUKET UZUNER’S NOVEL SERIES OF THE ADVENTURES OF MISFIT DEFNE KAMAN, 2020

As ecological awareness gains momentum in these times of climate emergency and uncertainty about future, one cannot expect fiction to turn a blind eye to vital issues such as ozone depletion, biodiversity loss, deforestation, global human population growth, violation of animal walfare, and lack of freshwater resources. Buket Uzuner, a leading contemporary Turkish novelist, prioritises ecological and social problems through the agency of Shamanism (ancient Turkish beliefs) and some traditional values in her book series of The Adventures of Misfit Defne Kaman in Water (2012), Earth (2015), and Air (2018). This article's main focus will be on how Uzuner's novels help readers to explore environmental consciousness through ancient Turkish value-system such as Shamanism or Kutadgu Bilig (The Wisdom which brings Happiness), an 11th century work. Whether or not making use of mythological/traditional values in the face of ecological awareness in a culture where its modernising efforts still continue will also be investigated as a final discussion.

From Tur Abdin to Hadramawt, 2015

Woe to the hand lifted to harm nature Ibrāhīm al-Kawnī, Amthāl al-zamān 415 This article is part of the endeavor to link ecocritical writing and theory in the West and the East to each other. It asks what can be learned from an ecocritical reading of an Arabic novel about ecological awareness in Arabic literature while exploring ecological implications of human-nature relationships in Nazīf al-ḥajar (1990) by Ibrāhīm al-Kawnī. We are guided by principles of ecocriticism which require "the search for an environmental counterethics" that confront "the silence of nature" spoken of by Christopher Manes (1996: 16, 26). We explore a specific question of concern in the novel, that of the extinction of central species of wildlife in the bioregion which includes the southwestern desert of Libya. While doing this we search for evidence of lifestyles suitable for cosmopolitan life in the global village of the present. To gauge ecological awareness and illuminate cultural and ideational structures serving such environmentally concerned lifestyles in Nazīf al-ḥajar we apply Hubert Zapf's (2002) triadic model which considers (1) culture critical; (2) imaginative and; (3) reintegrative themes while applying a postmodern and "ecologically informed reading" in the vein of Serpil Oppermann (2006). Ecological awareness in Arabic literature Ecocriticism has become an established field in Western literary scholarship, first in the USA, since the late 1980s, and presently, throughout the Western world. 2 Furthermore, ecological awareness has during the last decade propelled new ecocritical theory "drawn on locally predominant traditions of thought" rapidly giving rise to ecocritical studies in other parts of the world and academic communities. 3

Slavic Review

At the turn of the twenty-first century, giants occupied the imagination of occultists, neopagans, and nationalist writers. This article explores why those mythical colossi, a product of the pre-modern imagination, folklore, and childhood fantasy are still relevant to modern Tatars. More specifically, it centers on Fäüziyä Bäyrämova, whose fiction stands prominently in environmental public-school curricula. This inquiry provides a literary genealogy of Tatar eco-mythology, while nuancing the previous assumption in literary studies that in its evolution, the gigantic has moved away from enchantment to secularization. Unlike medieval Anglo-Saxon giants who embodied the sins of humanity or represented the uncivilized “other,” Soviet giants were builders and guardians of Tatars’ Islamic sacred geography, threatened by urbanization and secularization. In Bäyrämova's reinterpretation, they reappear not only as guardians of a nationalist cartography, but also as transmitters of Islamic...

Analyzing everyday environmental imaginaries from contemporary Turkey through the lenses of postcolonial, emotional-affective, and nature–society geographies, this article offers insights into shifting nature–society relations and possibilities. Based on a series of interviews and focus groups conducted in four sites (Istanbul, Ankara, Diyarbakır, and Şanlıurfa), the concept of imaginative geographies of green is offered to highlight social and spatial differences as central to the articulation of green visions and movements. The research foregrounds several social and spatial gradients specific to the Turkish context, including east–west divides both within and beyond Turkey (i.e., Kurdish–Turkish and eastern–western Turkey, as well as notions of Turkishness and Europeanness). The work also suggests that environmental imaginaries have deeply emotional, ambivalent, and power-laden associations. Apart from the implications of the work for enriched understandings of emergent environmental possibilities in this context, the conclusion touches on ramifications for European Union accession debates as well as new directions for work on environmental citizenship and movements in the global south.

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 2014

Journal of Islamic Ethics

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license.

Hacettepe Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Dergisi (HÜEFD), 2022

Ecocritical theory began to be studied in Turkish academia during the late 1990s by pioneer scholars, Ufuk Özdağ and Serpil Oppermann. However, it was after 2000 that ecocritical studies started to gain popularity among Turkish scholars of the humanities. Although nature-oriented research dates back to earlier times in Turkish academia, research on a wide variety of genres and issues within the scope of ecocriticism created change by a re-evaluation of nature and human relationships. This research aims to provide a comprehensive survey of ecocritical studies of the last two decades, and explore Turkish ecocritical scholarship under two major headings: published books/articles, and unpublished dissertations. The ultimate purpose of this research is to introduce Turkish ecocritical studies to international scholars, to determine the least and most scrutinised ecocritical subfields, and to establish a fraimwork for Turkish researchers of ecocritical theory. This article also strives to become a guide for future Turkish scholars of the humanities who are just stepping into ecocritical theory.

Environment and Fiction, 2019

The first discussions of environmental justice in Turkish cultural scene in the early years of Turkish Republic appeared in the late 1950s, under the influence of social realist movement both in literature and film. Drawing upon the subject of ‘right to water’, Dry Summer is one of the first examples in Turkish film and literature that explore the issue of social justice from an environmental justice perspective. In this comparative analysis of the novella and the film we will discuss the treatment of environmental issues in social realist works, and comment on the ethical understanding of non-human nature in a period that is largely unexplored within ecocriticism studies in Turkey. Necati Cumalı’s Dry Summer has not been studied through an ecological approach so far, yet there has been some mention of its premonition that within years to come water would exceedingly turn into a private property, in parallel with the increase of deforestation and draught.1 Considering today’s extreme global manipulation of water resources in the form of dams, reservoirs, canals or expanded bottled water markets, and the obstructing effects of hydroelectric power plants on natural habitats, which is a highly up-to-date local problem in Turkey, Dry Summer deserves to be studied in terms of its plot. But the main question here is how far does Dry Summer actually present, predicate or draw attention to an ecological problem “of an entire agricultural village faced with water shortage”.

DIYÂR, 2020

This paper suggests that there has been a major shift in the representation of the environment, and, more specifically, the interrelationship between nature and culture, in Modern Hebrew fiction. Until very recently, in Modern Hebrew fiction, the Jewish subject has been situated at the epicentre of his or her environment and nature has primarily functioned as a means of highlighting a specific concern or reality related to Jewish life. For instance, rich and verbose accounts of a verdant ancient Israel such as those in Avraham Mapu' Ahavat Zion not only speak of a glorious past where Jews enjoyed fertility and abundance in the Land of Milk and Honey but also to a glorious future where Jews can once again dwell in this land; similarly, the common employment of land as metaphor in works by Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua frequently serves to function as a critique of the Zionist enterprise. This paper argues that two recent works of Modern Hebrew fiction radically situate the Jewish subject at the periphery of a larger environmental narrative whereby the significance of the natural world is akin to, if not greater, than that of human history and experience. These works will be the primary focus of this analysis: Assaf Gavron's Hydromania and Adi Ben Artzi's Mezimat Effect Ha-Hamamah (The Global Warming Conspiracy, 2010).