The return of children: A comparative study on the contemporary Turkish and Irish novel

Abstract

In Infancy and History Agamben suggests, following Benjamin’s footsteps, that true experience is only possible in infancy, a time when experience is not yet expropriated by the bareness of modern life. The kind of potentiality that he attributes to infancy signifies the emergence of a new self, who, rather than moving into the mechanical domain of “work” prefers to remain in the creative territory of “play,” where it is possible to transform the old societal structures into new ones. Agamben’s approach to play and its non-chronological temporality offers useful clues in revealing the dynamics of the increasing number of contemporary childhood narratives in Irish and Turkish literature, where characters resist the linear structure of the bildungsroman and the corresponding model of progress eventually forming a culture of adolescents resistant to maturity. Focusing on some common features of these novelistic characters, such as playfulness, self-experimentation, and messianic idealism, this paper argues that the return of children to contemporary Turkish and Irish novel opens a new terrain of possibilities that offer liberation from the poverty of experience Agamben attributes to modern society.