Commonalities of Surreal And Postmodern Aesthetics in Oğuz Atay's Short Story "Neither Yes Nor No”

English (OpenAlex)

The Turkish literature of the Republican Period, a stage in which modern Turkish literature developed in a Western way and made serious breakthroughs, is a process in which different artistic understandings are successfully applied through different genres. The surrealist aesthetics adopted by the Garip Movement poets in the 1940s, and the postmodernist attitude that started with Oğuz Atay in the 1970s and continued with names such as Orhan Pamuk and Hasan Ali Toptaş are concrete indicators of the fundamental changes in Turkish literature. This study is based on the cynical attitude in surrealism that opposes the logical order and singular reality, the importance given to the subconscious, and the original expression techniques, as well as the hyperrealism of postmodernism, the aspect of intertextuality that makes use of techniques such as parody, irony, sarcastic/ridiculous transformation, and the commonalities created by the gamification of language, which it transforms into an ontological issue. The study aims to examine the common aspects of surrealist attitude and postmodern aesthetics in literary works, in a comparative and text-centered manner, through the short story "Ne Evet Ne Hayır" (Neither Yes Nor No). Following a descriptive method, the analysis of the aforementioned short story was made by considering the identical or similar principles of both movements. In line with the data obtained, it has been determined that the humor, language use, view of reality, and subconscious preferences in the short story are suitable for both surrealism and postmodernism.