A German, Nordic, and Slavic+ lecture with Nergis Ertürk (Penn State University)
Friday, April 11, 4-6 pm
Room 332, The Pyle Center
This talk will begin with an overview of literary connections between Turkey and the Soviet Union in the early 20th century, focusing on the late 1930s and 1940s, a time of increased communist translation and literary production in Turkey. While many scholars see the Second World War as a period of decline in Soviet literary exchange, the 1940s were marked by significant experimentation with Marxist and socialist realist styles in Turkey. Professor Ertürk will explore the work of Suat Derviş, a key communist woman writer, and her role in reimagining the socialist realist novel. After being imprisoned in 1944 during a communist crackdown, Derviş wrote novels reflecting her secret involvement with the Turkish Communist Party. Her 1948 novel Phosphorescent Cevriye reimagines the “positive hero” in socialist realism, depicting a sex worker’s transformation into a revolutionary. The novel’s language and its erotic subplot make it an important feminist reinterpretation of socialist realism and a key work in Marxist feminist thought.
Nergis Ertürk is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Penn State University. She is the author of two monographs: Writing in Red: Literature and Revolution Across Turkey and the Soviet Union (Columbia University Press, 2024) and Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey (Oxford University Press, 2011), the recipient of the 2011 Modern Language Association (MLA) Prize for a First Book. Her work has also appeared in the journals PMLA, Modernism/Modernity, boundary 2, New Literary History, Interventions, Middle Eastern Literatures, Comparative Literature, Birikim, and Jadaliyya.
Sponsored by the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic. Cosponsored by the Center for Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia and the Kemal H. Karpat Center for Turkish Studies.