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Article A Bakhtinian Perspective for the Chronotopic Evaluation of Symbols in “hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway(Ovidius University, 2024) Aksoy, N.B.This paper discusses the metaphoric and spatial representations in the short story “Hills Like White Elephants” from the perspective of Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope. Bakhtin explains the concept of chronotope in literary texts as the intersection of space and time configured either in abstract or concrete entities, represented by symbols and metaphors or real-time objects and spaces. In the story, an unmarried pregnant girl and the child's father are portrayed at a train station discussing their and their unborn child's future. The story reflects the qualities of a typical Hemingway style, the “iceberg theory” he favours in storytelling. The train station in the story is located at the intersection of railway lines in the direction of Barcelona and Madrid, and this location becomes a symbol of the decision the couple will make at that particular historical time about keeping or aborting the baby. The station is situated between a patch of dry brown land and long and white hills across the fertile valley of the Ebro river, where the characters are about to decide whether to go back to their old, barren life or keep the baby and move on to a promising and happy life. This spatial juncture, the train station, symbolizing a public space of modernity, and the contrasting hills like white elephants, symbolizing the personal dilemma of the pregnant girl, intersect in the characters’ lives and illustrate Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope. This particular chronotope reveals the conflict and tension between the hills like white elephants and the train station near the barren, dry, brown earth, as well as between the woman and man in their perceptions of their lives and future together. © 2024 Ovidius University. All rights reserved.Article Gendered Space in Alexander Mccall Smith’s the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency(Ovidius University, 2021) Aksoy,N.B.Classic detective fiction provides an ideal space where issues of gender identities can be investigated along with the changing modes of crime fiction. Previously, in detective or crime fiction, women were displayed as victims or villains attached with social and cultural stereotypes. However, beginning in the 80s and 90s female characters started to be represented as detectives and investigators, which allowed space to the renegotiating of women’s place in social and gender norms. Against this background, Alexander McCall Smith comes to the fore as a unique author who has managed to create the Mma Ramontswe character, owner of Ladies’ No. 1 Detective Agency in an African setting, mainly Botswana, the country where he lived as a child and as a youth. Mma Ramotswe is an unconventional detective conducting her amateur profession in a space predominantly inhabited by herself and a fellow assistant lady detective. The novels evolving around No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency in serial form develop in two tracks. Firstly, the office of the agency is essentially a space for lady detectives which provides a metaphorical opportunity to explore gender roles in the less known country of Botswana, a former British colony, within the frame of postcolonial issues that are dealt with extreme subtlety by the author. Secondly, the outer space, which is Africa, where the stories occur is a geographical space recreated by a Scottish, white, medical law professor who never refrains from displaying his partiality towards Africa. Hence, the outer space becomes subject to a representation by the interpretation of a male author belonging to the colonial culture. Consequently, my presentation will focus on the discussion of metaphorical representation of gendered space in the detective fiction of Alexander McCall Smith and the social, cultural and postcolonial aspects of the representation of Africa being the outer space of these novels. © 2021 Ovidius University. All rights reserved.Article SPACES AND PLACES OF MODERNITY AND THE MODERN ARTIST IN OĞUZ ATAY’S “RAILROAD STORYTELLERS - A DREAM”(Konstantin Preslavsky University of Shumen, 2024) Aksoy,N.B.This paper examines Atay’s “Railroad Storytellers - A Dream” in terms of Atay’s modernist experimentation in his depiction of space and spatiality, emphasising his contribution to Turkish literature as a pioneer modernist author. Oğuz Atay’s distinctive and innovative style, which forms his affinities with the early Western modernists such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, establishes his significant place as a pioneer modernist author in Turkish literature in the 1970s. The concept of ‘house/ home’ by Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space (1957, 2014) is instrumental for me as it pertains to the predicament of three storytellers as artists in the nameless and remote railroad station. The narrator of the story and his fellow storytellers gradually sink into disconnection, confusion, misery and poverty in an environment that represents the cold and unwelcoming face of technological modernisation symbolised by the space of the train station. The narrator’s quest for finding a ‘home’ to connect him to his readers and where he could exist as an artist comes to life in his attempt to write a letter to his readers, telling them he is still ‘here’ and asking them where they are. No matter how blighted that effort is since the narrator has no address to send the letters to, the endings for Atay’s story imply a need for connection with his readers expressed in the impossible meeting of the ‘here’ with the ‘where’ in spite or because of the estrangement and alienation of the artist/author in the modern world. Hence, the possibility of space as a ‘home’ for the author/narrator dwindles in the not forthcoming answer to the letter that will never reach its destination. Copyright © 2024 N. Berrin Aksoy.
