Istanbul’s ghost stories: Investigating the urban gothic space in Ahmet Ümit’s “A Memento for Istanbul” and Barbara Nadel’s “Land of the Blind”

This dissertation examines the representations of Istanbul as an Urban Gothic Space in Ahmet Ümit’s “A Memento for Istanbul” and Barbara Nadel’s “Land of the Blind”. The study explores the urban space of Istanbul and argues for its palimpsestic nature, haunted by the blood and memories of the past civilizations and empires that it was once home to. Further emphasis is placed on the constant tug of war between the old and the new and East vs West. The supernatural and various transgressions which are manifested mainly in the historical parts of the urban city are investigated by employing various theories of Gothic and related fields. The first chapter starts with a reading of Ahmet Ümit’s historical crime fiction “A Memento for Istanbul” employing an Urban Gothic framework, accompanied by Derrida’s concept of “Hauntology”. Furthermore, a survey of the city’s history in accordance with the theories is conducted. In the second chapter, in Barbara Nadel’s crime fiction “Land of The Blind”, the intersecting stories of the victim Ariadne Savva and the Negroponte family are explored through Bakhtin’s Chronotopes and Carnivalesque. The Negroponte’s “Gothic House” is discussed by employing Freud’s “Uncanny”, together with Poe’s recurring Gothic theme, “Fear of being buried alive”. Additionally, two Gothic subgenres are investigated, i.e. “The Queer Uncanny” and “Gothic Postmodernism”. In the third chapter Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “Flâneur” is employed. Inspector Nevzat Akman from “A Memento for Istanbul” and Inspector Çetin Ikmen from “Land of The Blind” are compared and portrayed as Flâneur-detectives turning the idle act of strolling into a purposeful act of investigating crime and historicizing the Gothic city in the process. Moreover, the protagonist Ariadne Savva is depicted as a female engaging in “street haunting” through Woolf’s concept of the “Flâneuse''.