B.A. (Baskent, Turkey) M.A. (Brock), Ph.D. (Trent)
Thesis: "Society Doesn't Exist": The Breakdown of Paternal Authority and the Illegitimate Origins of (Post) Oedipal Society
Examining Committee:
James Penney (Supervisor), Feyzi Baban and Jonathan Bordo
External Examiner: Dina Georgis, University of Toronto
Internal Examiner: Suzanne Bailey
Chair: Hugh Hodges
Abstract
This thesis attempts to provide a psychoanalytic discussion of the institution of paternal authority and its crisis in modernity within a theoretical and literary-historical framework. It proceeds from the psychoanalytic view that far from liberating the subject, the decline of the father’s function generates new inhibitions and complexes, and illustrates this with examples from literature, history, and politics. It reads the Freudian Oedipal Father and Lacanian Name-of-the-Father both as symptoms, serving as means of avoiding the libidinal deadlock evoked by the absence of paternal authority. It employs a particular literature on the absurd represented in the works of Franz Kafka’s The Trial and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s The Time Regulation Institute in order to explore the inconspicuous effects of this deadlock within the politics of nationalism in modern European and Turkish history. While it approaches Kafka’s The Trial as a prophetic text that anticipates the Nazi totalitarian state of the coming decade in its unique fictionalization of the failure of the paternal metaphor, or the Name-of-the-Father, it detects in Tanpınar’s The Time Regulation Institute traces of the trauma of Turkish modernization perceived as a half-hearted patricide which is commonly construed in Oedipal terms.
Gozde Kilic was an international PhD student at Trent University, a graduate of Baskent University, Turkey with a BA degree in American Culture and Literature and Brock University with an MA degree in Popular Culture. Her research interests are varied, but most generally involve psychoanalysis,post-modernity and subjectivity. She has recently finished her MA thesis,that dealt with the issues of the breakdown of the family and the decline of paternal authority in contemporary American society by giving emphasis to how it affects the subject (weakening of the super-ego, emergence of narcissism as a prevailing social problem). At Trent, she likes to continue her research, but she is also open to different directions her research might take. Apart from her academic preoccupations, she likes to write for a general audience in online magazines and newspapers. She is interested in creative fiction, especially travel and food writing.