Between desire and truth: the narrative resolution of modern-traditional dichotomy in Asmalı Konak

Abstract

This thesis seeks to analyze a television serial Asmalı Konak, which has been aired in Turkey for two years and become the most popular television serial during this period. Asmalı Konak is worth examining as a cultural text, which raises crucial questions concerning the modern-traditional dichotomy in Turkey, which has been the uppermost conflict to be resolved to become properly modern in the nationalist imaginary of Turkey. In order to answer the question why Asmalı Konak has been so popular, I follow an ethnographic approach. I first analyze the visual, generic and narrative qualities of the serial. The visual aspects are handled as the setting of the narrative. For the generic analysis, I compare the genres of soap opera and melodrama arguing that the genre has to do with the wider social context. Further, I make a narrative analysis arguing that Asmalı Konak is a story of change that is constructed through the narrative structure that involves conflict resolution processes. After looking at how the text is encoded, I undertake a qualitative research to investigate how it is decoded. I conducted four focus group interviews with the middle classwoman viewers of Asmalı Konak. How they decode the conflict resolution processes, and how they assess the characters within those processes are the questions I seek to answer in my analysis of the ethnographic data. I argue that there are two registers according to which the viewers comment on the narrative: register of truth and register of desire. In my analysis ofthe decoding process, I elaborate on how they construe the narrative according to these registers.