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“Who is the Woman in Furs?”: Reading Ali’s “Madonna in the Fur Coat” and Sacher-Masoch’s “Venus in Furs” Together
Abstract
This paper will analyze prominent Turkish novelist Sabahattin Ali’s rather neglected novel “Kürk Mantolu Madonna / The Madonna in the Fur Coat” (1943) through the intertextuality performed by the author. Ali adopted the form of Sacher-Masoch’s famous novel “Venus in Furs” and incorporated many elements of “Venus’” content into his novel “Kürk.” In addition, Ali performed intertextuality to display the contending repertoires of the so-called “East” and “West.” Given the author’s prominent role in the “Westernization” project managed by the Turkish government between the 1920s and 1940s, it is very difficult to determine which side Ali took in the heated debate of “Westernization.” Was he opposing the Westernization project and its nullifying effects or was he an ardent supporter of connecting Western humanism to Turkish humanism? This paper argues that Ali took neither of the sides. Ali’s novel “Kürk” is a compelling representation of the contemporary debates on the social and cultural change brought by the Westernization project. Through the questioning of this representation, this paper offers a new interpretation to Ali’s “social-realist” authorship, which is construed around his first novel “Kuyucakli Yusuf.” In addition, the comparative method applied in this paper will suggest a new approach to the interpretation of the Westernization project in the 1940s, the close cultural and technical relations between Turkish and German contexts, and it will ask new questions on the comparative methodology and its functions. This paper seeks to contribute to the cluster of scholarship on early Republican Turkey’s Westernization paradigm, Turkish Literature, and the relation between Turkey and Germany before World War II.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
Turkey
Sub Area
Turkish Studies