TOXİC IN LITERATURES IN ENGLISH
Project no. 797 · Status: Kapanmış · 2018
Summary
The primary meaning of the word toxic is synonymous with “poisonous;” however, it also means, “causing unpleasant feelings, harmful or malicious.” With the increasing interest in environmental issues in social sciences and literature, the toxic has evolved into a new phenomenon to seek out in imaginative texts not only in the sense of an ecocritical point of view, but also in the sense of the essence of literature. Lawrence Buell, in his 1998 article entitled “Toxic Discourses” attracts attention to the “fear of a poisoned world being pressed, debated, debunked, and reiterated from many disciplinary vantage points.” However, he claims, toxicity is seldom discussed as a discourse. Therefore, he aims at defining the “forms, origins, uses, and critical implications of toxic rhetoric, conceiving it as an interlocked set of topoi whose force derives partly from the exigencies of an anxiously industrializing culture, partly from deep-rooted Western attitudes.” This project, also, has the same sensibility. The project is planned to unravel some significant questions and issues such as whether the evolving and altering nature of the concept of toxic is evident in literatures in English, representations, how these representations are bound to the themes and perspectives, and how these relations are crystallised. In this sense, the studies in this project range from the direct meaning of toxic to the metaphorical uses in literature. The aim of this project is to focus on the representations of the toxic and toxic discourse in literature from a variety of perspectives. This project seeks to provide a ground for the discussion of the toxic and literature in the framework of a wide range of topics such as the toxicity of literary works, distortion and toxic in literature, the toxic and the body, and the depiction of the environment in relation to the toxic. Within this aim, Prof. Dr. Rezzan Kocaöner Silkü, with her study, “Manifestations of the Other as Toxic in the Postcolonial Novel” Assist. Prof. Dr. Önder Çetin, with the study entitled “‘The Roaring Sea’: Symbiotic Relationship between Toxic Culture and Environment in Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef”, Assist. Prof. Dr. Funda Civelekoğlu, with her study, “Toxic Progress of Human Being”, Res. Assist. Dilek Menteşe Kıryaman, with her research, “Toxic Consciousness in Ian McEwan’s Solar” and Res. Assist. Erkin Kıryaman, with “The Toxic Within: The Paradox of Family in The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing” contributed to the project in order to reveal the uses of toxic in these works with different contexts and miscellaneous theories. Key words: toxic, toxic discourse, English literature, environment, ecocriticism, postcolonial novel, family.