Cenk Tan

Pamukkale University · Department of Foreign Languages

John Christopher's Empty World (1977) is an apocalyptic novel which depicts a fatal pandemic through the eyes of adolescent children. In specific, the story is presented through the perspective of fifteen-year-old Neil Miller who loses his family and heads off to the streets of London to seek company in his quest for survival in a desolated city. N...

Bilimkurguyu Anlamak; son yıllarda edebiyat, sinema ve popüler kültürde ön plana çıkan bilimkurgu türüne dair Türkçe yayımlanmış akademik içerikli kitapların sınırlı sayıda olmasından yola çıkarak alandaki boşluğu doldurmak ve Türkçeye bilimkurgu eleştirisi bağlamında önemli bir eser kazandırmak amacıyla ortaya çıkarılmıştır. Bilimkurguyu alt türle...

Ecocritical theory began to be studied in Turkish academia during the late 1990s by pioneer scholars, Ufuk Özdağ and Serpil Oppermann. However, it was after 2000 that ecocritical studies started to gain popularity among Turkish scholars of the humanities. Although nature-oriented research dates back to earlier times in Turkish academia, research on...

Adaptation/film studies is displayed a growing interest in literature as more scholars take up articles to produce authentic research. Due to its interdisciplinary and intertextual nature, adaptation/film studies provide scholars of humanities the means to create preliminary works never published before. This article articulates the importance of a...

Black Mirror is not only among the most popular but also the most debated science fiction productions. The series, which premiered on the British Channel 4 channel in 2011 and later gained popularity worldwide after being acquired by Netflix, thoroughly explores various themes such as technology, crime and punishment, consumption, ethics, and freed...

Trainspotting (1993) is a novel written by Scottish author Irvine Welsh that recounts the story of a group of heroin addict youngsters who struggle with addiction, economic hardship and alienation from the society. The novel follows the protagonist and narrator, Mark Renton’s quest who is part of a group of friends including Sick Boy, Begbie, Spud,...

Dystopian narratives have been reinterpreted and reproduced throughout the years. The rising number of dystopian stories has led to the creation of unusual but innovative and striking examples of fictions. In this context, strangeness is a peculiar quality of dystopian fiction which reflects the genre’s creative and intellectual capability. This pa...

The Man in the High Castle (1962) is one of Philip K. Dick’s most acclaimed and striking novels. The narrative is set in an alternate reality where the Axis powers have won the Second World War and occupied the United States, dividing the country into three regions: the Nazi ruled greater Reich, the Pacific Japanese States and the neutral zone. As...

Post-Theories in Literary and Cultural Studies focuses on the shifting paradigms in literary and cultural studies. Prompted by the changes and problems on the global scale, the last two decades have seen a resurgence of scholarly interest in theories which are more embedded in the social realities and human condition. This volume shows that theory...

Post-Theories in Literary and Cultural Studies focuses on the shifting paradigms in literary and cultural studies. Prompted by the changes and problems on the global scale, the last two decades have seen a resurgence of scholarly interest in theories which are more embedded in the social realities and human condition. This volume shows that theory...

Gregory David Roberts is a contemporary Australian author who had been involved in several criminal activities and was therefore convicted to prison sentence earlier in his life. In 2003, he published the semi-autobiographical novel Shantaram largely based on his experiences in the Indian city of Bombay. The novel, which became a best-seller around...

Oscar Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray has been the subject of analysis from a wide variety of theoretical and thematic perspectives. This study endeavours to conduct a philosophical interpretation of the renowned Wildean work of fiction. In specific, the article aims to carry out a dialectic reading of The Picture of Dorian Gray by c...

The Purloined Letter" is the third of the three Dupin stories that Edgar A. Poe wrote and published in 1844. Contrary to being a typical example of detective fiction which usually involves an investigation to find out what is being kept hidden, "The Purloined Letter" is rather concerned with finding out what is being kept in plain sight. Dupin's fa...

James Graham Ballard was a contemporary British author mostly known for his dystopian works dealing with climatic disasters, uncanny catastrophes and the negative effects of technological modernity. Ballard’s fourth novel, The Crystal World (1966) tells the unusual story of Edward Sanders, a medical doctor treating leprosy patients in Cameroon. Tog...

Adalet Ağaoğlu’s Fikrimin İnce Gülü is one of the most celebrated novels of contemporary Turkish literature. Published in 1976 and dealing with a variety of themes, the novel tells the story of Bayram, a Turkish immigrant worker’s journey from the Turkish border gate to his native village. This study aims to analyse Bayram’s narrative under two maj...

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus is one of the most celebrated novels of the 19th century and of speculative fiction. The novel represents a philosophical journey to the inner depths of the human experience. While the novel focuses on a variety of issues and themes, this study mainly deals with the notion of “Quixotism” and “Qui...

Scottish playwright Stef Smith’s Human Animals (2016) recounts the fictional story of a government exterminating all animals in London with the pragmatic pursuit of building commercial construction sites on their natural habitats. In line with recent trends of thought, dramatic texts are getting more engaged with different natures of the relationsh...

James Graham Ballard was a contemporary British novelist who published a wide variety of works ranging from climate fiction to transgressive fiction. “The Ultimate City” (1976) is one of Ballard’s short stories that portrays a dystopian vision where a utopian urban experiment transforms into a catastrophe. The story tells the attempt of the protago...

Bilimkurguyu Anlamak kitabının içinde bilimkurgu türlerini tanıtan ve örneklerinin analizini yapan çalışmalarının yanı sıra bilimkurguya farklı kuramsal perspektiflerden okuma önerileri getiren çalışmalara da rastlamak mümkün. Bu okumalardan birini de Cenk Tan, “Tüketicilikten Yamyamlığa Uzanan bir Modernite Eleştirisi: Yeni Dalga BK ve J. G. Balla...

Home has had various meanings and functions throughout history. Commonly regarded as a place of shelter, the meanings ascribed to home have changed tremendously. One of these remarkable changes occurred during the 1970s in London where the buildings known as "High Rises" were constructed. Published in 1975, James Graham Ballard's High Rise tells th...

Caryl Churchill is one of Britain’s most prominent and talented contemporary playwrights. Since the 1960s, the author has published thirty plays dealing with a wide variety of subjects from political matters to gender issues and ecological problems. Amongst the many issues and social problems of Churchill’s dramatic oeuvre, natural concerns and env...

Todd Phillips' Joker (2019) is an origin story which not only portrays a psychological drama but also forms a good example of a detailed character study case. The film embodies two main layers which are psychological and social. Within the context of the psychological layer, the viewers witness the gradual metamorphosis of a mentally-ill person int...

Paul Verhoeven'ın 1987 yapımı RoboCop filmi, çok katmanlı sosyo-politik yapısıyla popüler kültür ikonu olmayı başarmış bir bilimkurgu yapımıdır. RoboCop, geniş yel-pazede sosyal meselelere değinen, dönemin popüler bilimkurgu örneklerinden biri-dir. Bu çalışma, RoboCop sinema filmini üç temel başlık olan: dehümanizasyon, teknokapitalist korporatizm...

Humour is an element of literature that has been used for many centuries. From Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Shakespeare’s comedies up to Jonathan Swift’s masterpiece Gulliver’s Travels, humour has always been a notion that appeals strongly to the human emotion. Humour has evolved into many types such as irony, satire, black humour, parody etc. an...

J.G. Ballard's The Concentration City and Billennium are both short stories that depict an utterly dystopian vision about the future of urban development. The Concentration City provides a glimpse of an overgrown, gigantic city with no limits whereas Billennium presents a perspective of the burden of living in an overpopulated society. Both stories...

J.G. Ballard is one of the most influential British authors of the 20 th century. Renowned for his surrealist works of fiction, Ballard delivered the primary examples of climate fiction. The Drowned World is J.G. Ballard's second novel of a post-apocalyptic quadrilogy. The novel tells the story of a scientist's quest for survival amidst a global fl...

John Christopher’s Empty World (1977) is one of the most remarkable examples of contemporary British apocalyptic fiction. The novel recounts the story of 15 year old Neil Miller who loses his parents in a tragic car accident and is left behind as the only survivor of his family. Trying to adapt to his new life with his grandparents, a horribly fata...

Ecofeminism is a subgenre of ecocriticism that came into existence within the second wave of ecocriticism. Scholars such as Karen J. Warren and Greta Gaard have advocated that the women's cause cannot be held apart from the cause of the natural environment and have therefore emphasized the necessity of ecofeminism. To that end, ecofeminists maintai...

Literary utopias and dystopias reflect a wide variety of concerns, from class and gender issues to the environment. These works not only reflect current social matters but also provide a glimpse of possible futures and a warning of perils to come. This article analyzes two science fiction films that have been in the spotlight during the last decade...

A pioneer of postmodernist fiction, James Graham Ballard has written many works that have challenged the limits of human insight. As the author of many postmodern works, including Crash, High Rise and Concrete Island, J.G. Ballard has revolutionized fiction in the late 20th century. Billennium is a short story published by Ballard in the 1962 editi...

As the all-time longest running television cartoon, The Simpsons bears a great deal of political implications. Among these implications, class conflict in general and Gramscian and Althusserian stand out in particular. Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser are two intellectuals who have provided significant contributions to Marxist literary theory. T...

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is a dazzling postmodern work of fiction which includes six different narratives in six chapters, taking place in six time periods and locations. From the first chapter to the last, the narratives span over five centuries of human whereabouts on earth. Though disparate these chapters may seem at first sight, they are ac...

The Drought is the third work in a trilogy of climate fiction novels published in the early 1960s. As the primary examples of climate fiction, The Drought stands out in the series as the novel in which the catastrophe is fully caused by human activities. Thus, suitable for ecocritical analysis, this article analyzes The Drought from a social ecolog...

This study focuses on an ecocritical analysis of J.G. Ballard’s climate fiction novels of the early 1960s. Ecocritical perspectives, social ecological in specific have been utilized to shed light on the selected three novels of J.G. Ballard—The Wind from Nowhere, The Drowned World and The Drought. In contrast with the widespread scholarly research...

A Game of Thrones is a stunning medieval fantasy which tells the story of the immense struggle for power in an ancient world named ‘The Seven Kingdoms’. It was originally written as a series of novels by the American author George R. R. Martin in 1996 and adapted to the TV screen by HBO in 2011. The series has completed its sixth season and is sche...

Dystopian fiction serves as a premonition against possible future perils of humanity. Its popularity is largely attributed to its overdose of action and commercial success which explains the high number of film adaptations in Hollywood. However, the genre is commonly acclaimed to be dominated by men whereas women usually exist as vague, trivial per...

Semiotic elements pertaining to Marxist and anti-consumerist theory that are embedded in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas forms the main topic of this thesis. Thanks to its perfectly constructed postmodern structure and its coherent themes, Cloud Atlas could be regarded as one of the most striking and thought-provoking novels of the 21st century Britis...