Author(s): Ahmet ALVER
This article seeks to examine the reason why the March Twelfth novels, written in the decade following the 1971 military intervention, are predominantly read through critical frameworks of Western European literary and philosophical analysis. I will demonstrate that, from its inception, the Turkish novel was hugely influenced by the European literary tradition reflecting the, at times uneasy, relationship between the development of the Turkish state as a whole and the political and cultural evolutions of the West. I will stress that the relationship occurs at a strictly intellectual level: the March Twelfth novelists are open to the ideas of Western culture but quick to condemn what they see as its more decadent elements, just as the Tanzimat and early Republican novels did. In conclusion, I will argue that in the aftermath of March Twelfth, writers acknowledged the Western influence as the cause for the left’s failure to communicate its message to the masses.
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