In one's life there has always been a moment or an event that is so shocking and horrific that it is best to try to push it further and further back into your mind. When traumatized, it is very normal to close the memory and for self-defence to suppress the terrible emotional experience. Sometimes this neglecting and abandoning might be the best way to forget, and so do the characters Sethe and Paul D in Toni Morrison's Beloved. Trying to ignore their past and to avoid any related confrontations, they try to forget their terrible memories in Beloved. But, I think this forgetting is very temporary and it lasts only until the smallest event prompts the memory and then the formidable past is experienced once again as painful as it once was. Toni Morrison carries Sethe on a kind of journey from being a woman who identifies herself with motherhood, to a woman who begins to identify herself as being a human being. Morrison brings this picture to life by letting Sethe face her past and bring to mind the events that she worked extremely hard to suppress and to forget. It seems impossible for her to remain in denial of the past. In this paper, I argue that the function of memory concerning the past experiences of the main characters in Beloved (especially Sethe and Paul D) depends upon their spatial and temporal relationships. To support my argument, Paul Ricoeur's theoretical assumptions concerning human memory, together with Daniel L. Schacter's The Seven Sins of Memory, provide the theoretical background for this analysis.
Travel literature and self-narratives are the most inclusive sources in which the perceptions of travellers and their subjective accounts can be analyzed and followed. They have been major genres in British literature for a long time in the forms of letters, narratives, and diaries in the sense that they offer "factual" information pertinent to historical scholarship, as well as fictional elements otherwise found in novels. In this respect, this study covers two female travellers and their accounts in terms of comparative basis. In her account titled An English Woman in Angora, Grace Ellison writes about her adventures and observations in Turkey right after Turkey's War of Independence in 1922 when the new Republic of Turkey was established. On the other hand, Martha Nicol stays in Izmir as a nurse and gives service in British Army Hospital in Izmir during the time of Crimean War (1853-1856). Apart from their male counterparts, one might consider the inveterate Turkophilia of both female travellers in their accounts through their discourses. In this regard, with a textual comparison of the above-mentioned accounts, the purpose of this paper is to reveal the change or stability by exploring the discursive strategies deployed by Ellison and Nicol towards and after the establishment of Republic in Turkey.
As a contemporary travel writer and journalist, Jeremy Seal has been travelling and writing for over twenty years with a special enthusiasm for Turkey. His first publication on Turkey was appeared in 1995 with the title of A Fez of the Heart: Travels Around Turkey in Search of a Hat (1995), which is a deeply instructive piece of present-day history as well as an entertaining insight into the soul of contemporary Turkey. Later publications of Seal cover The Sneakebite Survivors' Club: Travels among Serpents (1999), The Wreck at Sharpnose Point: A Victorian Mystery (2002), Santa: A Life (2005) and his recent travel book Meander: East to West Along a Turkish River (2012). This paper scrutinizes his last non-fiction Meander arguing that Seal nourishes his masterpiece both with the elements of travel literature and guidebooks of the touristic fashion. Therefore, he creates a unique form of literature encapsulating the new form of contemporary travel guidebooks. Foremost aim of this paper is to demonstrate Seal's Meander as both in the tradition of travel literature and touristic guidebook.
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