The Quest of Women and revisionist mythmaking in muinar and the penelopiad: just voices or “just” voices?

The aim of the present study is to explore the emancipatory potential of revisionist mythmaking strategies employed in two contemporary novels, Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005) and Latife Tekin’s Muinar (2006), through dialogic, intertextual, and deconstructive relations. Offering a comparative account by means of a three-fold theoretical basis between the two novels, this dissertation explores women’s paths to seek justice. Both novels portray rebellious women and give voice to their alternative stories. The analysis demonstrates that the retelling of mythic tales connects the past to the present and narrows the gap between absence and presence via specters. To this end, the thesis firstly examines dialogism and the way it is used to challenge the credibility of a narrator. In doing so, it draws on Bakhtin’s dialogism and its feminist interpretations. The second aim is to investigate how women oppose hegemonic discourse(s) through the dynamics of intertextuality. These dynamics and strategies are predominantly discussed with the ideas of various female critics such as Ostriker, Irigaray, and Cixous. In the last analysis, the study focuses on the concept of justice via Derridean deconstruction. Both novels are accordingly analyzed with references to concepts such as différance, justice l’avenir, and hauntology.