Sixteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

“Culture today is infecting everything with sameness” enounced Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their groundbreaking work Dialectic of Enlightenment. The critical theorists of The Frankfurt School have coined the term “culture industry”, referring to the commercial marketing of culture, and thus consumption of it by mass society. Today, in times of neoliberal capitalism, “the fraying of art” and the “de-artification of art” has reached devastating dimensions. This paper offers insight into Turkish literary production and consumption in the last few decades since the transformation of economic and social structure has been phenomenal. As the publishing industry has grown significantly, the correlation between authors, distributors, booksellers, readers, and critics has changed through and through. After Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “literary field” discussed in The Rules of Art, the work of literature has continued to evolve into a commercial object with numerous formats in accordance with the logic of the digital market. In this pessimistic outlook, literature seems to be a mighty medium of resistance regarding sustainability of culture. Within this framework, my paper focuses on Latife Tekin (b.1957), one of the most brilliant authors of contemporary Turkish literature, who is widely acclaimed for her novels on migration, poverty, and urban slums. Often labelled as a “magical realist”, she is actually in search of a specific style relevant to the indomitable spirit of Anatolia. Consequently, Tekin’s works offer a literary perspective to tough issues of sustainability in a cultural, social, political and environmental context.