Human voice echoing in the silence of god: worldliness and death in Tevfik Fikret’s poetry

Abstract

This dissertation suggests a possible reading of Tevfik Fikret’s poetry with reference to worldliness and its conceptual manifestation of death within the context of nineteenth century Ottoman poetry. In doing this, this dissertation situates Fikret’s oeuvre within the framework of innovation experience of Ottoman poetry after eighteenth century while at the same time keeping a critical distance from the reliance of Westernization/modernization discourse and its categorization of Ottoman poetry as old and new after the second half of the nineteenth century. It interprets this innovation as a process where God-centered paradigm which dominated Ottoman poetry was replaced with a different paradigm locating subject and its worldy experience to the center. More specifically, this dissertation focuses on the story of the Ottoman subject who struggles to build the new paradigm to give voice to its poetry as God ceases to be the sole determinant. Therefore, this dissertation discusses the poetry of Fikret in the course of a struggle which aims to give the ground on which the poetry and then the subject are to be determined. And it takes up death as a key concept in understanding such a subject’s struggle.