Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
BAKEA IX -INTERNATIONAL WESTERN CULTURAL AND LITERARY STUDIES SYMPOSIUM-"FICTION", Konya, Türkiye, 15 - 17 Eylül 2025, ss.126, (Özet Bildiri)
Charlotte Turner Smith presents in her “Beachy Head” a non-egotistical Romantic space countering the idealization of seeking refuge in nature or imagination as cut off from all human relations, through her subversive portrait of a hermit figure not living in a private dream world but joining the outside world and its material realities. Shifting the focus from the immaterial or the transcendental to the material or the down-to-earth and erasing the epistemic boundary between the I and not-I in her unorthodox portrayal of a hermit figure shaped not by egotism, alienation, or insensitivity but by empathy and sensitivity, as observed in his act of rescuing sailors from shipwrecks and burying the bodies of the dead ones rather than living in a detached and withdrawn way, Smith seems to be echoing Ihab Hassan’s contemporary notion of “fiduciary realism” addressing “self-emptying” or ego annihilation as “a postmodern aesthetic of trust” imbued with the idea of Keatsian negative capability. In this vein, this study argues that as observed in her unconventional hermit who attends to the existence of other subjects instead of retreating into indifference in a fantasy world, Smith gives a Romantic voice to what Hassan means by his “fiduciary realism” in his discussion as to what lies beyond postmodernism and similarly opens a new a post/non-anthropocentric hermeneutical pathway by her move from center-margin to margin-margin relationality, with both the hermit and the shipwrecked sailors being the marginalized of the humanist discourse in this locality on the edge of life.