The debate concerning the nature and the function of the canon and the place of high culture in British Studies is the underlying argument that links the three articles in the first part. Himmet Umunç, in his paper entitled “Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’: A Cultural Polysemy” (9-15), draws attention to the problematical relationship between the canon and the practice of cultural criticism, and argues that a full cultural analysis needs to push beyond the boundaries of the text and raise questions concerning cultural paradigms, in order to reveal the latent intertexts within and around the literary work. Umunç then offers an example of cultural reading by demonstrating the political and social intertexts of Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” The following article, “Shakespeare Transformed” (17-25) by Günseli Sönmez İşçi, aims to demonstrate how canonical texts are re-read and reconstructed in non-canonical ways. She argues that liberal, humanist, formalist, and essentialist readings of Othello are challenged by the anti-essentialist reading practiced by cultural materialists in the UK and new historicists in the US. The third article in this part, “British Studies and High Culture” (27-36) by Piotr Kuhiwczak, takes up a crucial problematic issue in British Studies, viz. the definition and place of high culture within the discipline. Kuhiwczak is concerned with the conspicuous absence of high culture in the framework of British Studies at an either practical or theoretical level. Kuhiwczak’s implicit critique of the agenda of British Studies invokes a central question concerning untested ideological convictions on behalf of popular forms of culture.
The following part of the volume brings together three articles which, in different ways, address the question of the politics of the popular. Süheyla Kırca in her article “Feminism, Femininity and Popular Culture” (39-47) draws attention to the troubled intersection of feminism and popular culture, and recalls the distinction between them, the first term designating political space, the other an object of study. In order to investigate feminist subtexts in women’s magazines, Kırca deconstructs a soap advertisement from Cosmopolitan, a top-selling magazine which, she notes, has promoted the concept of postfeminism and the new woman. The following article by Can Abanazır, “The Voices of the Streets: Rap and Punk” (49-55), moves into another direction within popular culture, by surveying and comparing a subculture. Abanazır aims to illuminate the socio-cultural backgrounds of New York and London that have created marginal groups, such as Rap and Punk, to voice their rebellious, anarchic, and aggressive reactions through their music. Gülriz Büken in her article entitled “The MacDonaldization of Britain” (59-65) takes yet another direction, seeking to illustrate the politics of American consumerism and pursue its impact in Britain. With an illuminating overview of “consumer religion” in contemporary global culture, Büken draws attention to the undesirable consequences of the globalization of consumption, especially with reference to the dissolution of moral and social values that defined identities in the past.
The third part contains four articles, each reflecting a central issue in postcolonial discourse. Oya Batum Menteşe in her paper “An Analysis of Otherness in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Lawrence Durell’s Bitter Lemons of Cyprus “ (69-81) presents the strategies of “othering,” especially with respect to gender and nation, and traces the discourse of such strategies in two disparate works. Her analysis of Wide Sargasso Sea reveals how Jean Rhys has created the myth of otherness in terms of gender, race, geographical and social distance, even political exclusion. Menteşe then discloses how in Bitter Lemons of Cyprus the Turkish Cypriots are “othered” in relation to Greek norms, and hence, how Durell’s so called objectivity is undercut by his orientalist discourse. In the following article, entitled “The Empire Writes Back Bilingually: Taner Baybars’s ‘Gülten’” (83-90), Gönül Pultar draws attention to the implications of biculturalism by analyzing the vocabulary used in the poem “Gülten” by Taner Baybars, a Turkish Cypriot and a British poet. The poem penned in English contains various words in other languages, the majority of which are in Turkish. Since Turkish Cypriots are poised culturally in an uneasy alliance between British and Turkish cultures, Pultar maintains that “Baybars’s insertion of Turkish words is a means of insurgence against the spiritual subjugation, a backlash against the cultural subjugation” (86). The third article, “Ethnic Writing: Writing Ethnicity” (91-103) by Dean Franco, aims to pursue the way in which Chicano ethnic identity receives its definition. Franco seeks the defining point not in literature itself but in the discourse of Chicano literary criticism where he maintains Chicano cultural identity implicitly reveals itself. In the last article in this part entitled “The Socio-cultural Conflicts of the Colonial Individual: V.S. Naipaul and his Protagonists (105-113), Rüçhan Kayalar examines the feelings of displacement and rootlessness as reflected in the novels of Naipaul. Kayalar argues that the themes of isolation and dislocation that Naipaul develops in his novels are reflections of personal experiences resulting from his own colonial background.
The articles in the last part of the collection consider feminist inquiries into gender roles in different contexts. Burçin Erol in her article “The Impact of the Two World Wars on the Roles and Rights of Women in Britain and the United States” (117-123) offers a comparative and informative study illustrating the socio-economic conditions of women and traditional gender roles during and after two world wars in the UK and the US. Gülsen Canlı in her article “Prescribed Representations of Women and Feminist Dynamics in the Theatre” (125-137) traces the same problem, the traditional gender roles, in a different arena, in the theatre. By analyzing representations of women in various plays, she discloses how the power relations of male-oriented culture have operated in the theatre during the 1950s and 1960s, and how after the women’s movement the feminist playwrights have challenged patriarchal ideology by constructing an alternative woman’s culture with altered gender roles. The same issue, representation of woman, is taken up from a slightly different standpoint in the last two articles. Ünal Norman, in her article “An Abortive Attempt: Tess” (139-149), discusses the innovative representation of Tess by Thomas Hardy who, she notes, helped break the constraints on woman’s sexuality in the mid-Victorian period. After examining the discourse in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, however, Norman concludes that male-oriented culture is at work in Hardy’s novel, and that his so-called new woman is still an object for male manipulation. The representation of women in literature is further developed in the final paper, “The Fallen Woman: Hester Prynne” (151-159) by Sevda Çalışkan. Employing the discourse of poststructuralists, Çalışkan reveals how Hester in The Scarlet Letter is positioned as the Other. She finally suggests an intimate connection between the representation of Hester in that novel and Hamlet’s well-known conviction, “Frailty, thy name is woman.”
Crossing the Boundaries does not, of course, cross all the boundaries.
The collection provides merely an overview of the developments in Turkish
universities, with scholars trying to shift their emphasis, in teaching
and in research, from a purely literary basis to the field of cultural
studies. In this sense, at least, the volume moves some borders. It is
therefore important that proceedings of the seminars such as this should
be published. As Laurence Raw remarks in the Preface, “the more people
in Turkey, or elsewhere, become aware of ‘Cultural Studies,’ as practiced
in different academic contexts, the more they can develop their own versions
of the discipline.”