The Department of Modern Languages is delighted to announce that Ersin Munuklu has successfully defended his PhD in German and Comparative Literature, under the supervision of Professor Ben Hutchinson, with a thesis entitled ‘Die Poetik des Marginalen: Eine vergleichende Untersuchung der Werke von Orhan Pamuk und W. G. Sebald’ [‘The Poetics of the Marginal: A Comparative Study of the Works of Orhan Pamuk and W. G. Sebald’].
Literature increasingly deals with marginalized individuals, criticizes dominant structures, uncovers hidden traces from a suppressed past and attempts to restitute the voices of marginalized people. Orhan Pamuk and W. G. Sebald engage with what is considered to be marginal in various ways in their prose: marginal spaces (political and geographical peripheries), marginal time (marginalised past), marginal subjects (marginalized humans) and objects (ruins, dilapidated buildings and seemingly dispensable objects) are the main subject matters in their works. The empathic engagement with the marginal constitutes a poetic principle in their narratives, in which the marginal is attributed with a specific significance and as a model of knowledge is given ethic-aesthetical value: a poetics of the marginal.
Our congratulations to Dr Munuklu.
For more details of research programmes in Modern Languages see: www.kent.ac.uk/secl/modern-languages/postgraduate