Narratives of resistance and political activism in post-1980 Turkish literature: reimagining 1970s Turkey in Muzaffer Oruçoğlu's Tohum and Latife Tekin's Gece Dersleri

This article offers a comparative critique of Latife Tekin's Gece Dersleri (1986) and Muzaffer Oru & ccedil;o & gbreve;lu's Tohum (1992) as antithetical engagements with the crisis of leftist militancy in 1970s Turkey. Framing post-1980 literature as a site of epistemological struggle, the study interrogates how these texts mobilize divergent aesthetic paradigms to reconfigure the memory of political defeat. Gece Dersleri disarticulates revolutionary grand narratives through fragmentation, interiority, and feminist critique, exposing the patriarchal structures embedded within leftist praxis, whereas Tohum reasserts testimonial authority through a masculinist ethic of endurance and ideological absolutism. Through close attention to narrative form, temporality, and voice, the article argues that these novels instantiate competing modes of remembering and theorizing resistance, and that their juxtaposition reveals not simply a literary divergence, but a broader contestation over the gendered logics, aesthetic norms, and political afterlives of revolutionary discourse in post-coup Turkish memory.