Traumatic poetics: Witnessing and its horizons in Leylâ Erbil’s last texts

Abstract

This thesis, centered upon the examination of the traumatic discourse and its ethical, political, and cultural constructions in Leylâ Erbil’s Üç Başlı Ejderha (2005), Kalan (2011), and Tuhaf Bir Erkek (2011) reveals that Erbil merged a peculiar trauma understanding by reconsidering representation, the root cause of literature. By labeling Erbil’s original theoretical effort as “traumatic poetics”, this thesis shows that it is functionalized in the textual imagination of a Messianic redemption. Erbil’s implementation and re-functionalization of mimetic and diegetic representational modes are named as “traumatic mimesis” and “traumatic diegesis”. In addition to these two modes, in this thesis, it is claimed that Erbil invented an original representational mode called “traumatic semiosis,” which creates signifiers that open the way to Messianic redemption by their annihilation while the signified got multiplied endlessly in time and place. While Erbil’s such ethical-political intervention that takes place in the context of trauma is exposed via textual analyses, her intervention is interpreted in its relations with the post-Vietnam trauma theory, literary trauma theory, continental philosophy, and psychoanalytical theory in their circulations in the world and Turkey.