Department of Comparative Literature, Dual-title with Visual Studies 

(Graduate Resident Summer 2025)

In this dissertation, taking Turkey as the axis, I examine the literary works and visual materials from the late 60s to the early 2020s based on mostly real hospital experiences and argue that they consider the hospital not only as a site for biopolitics but also as a sensory and material environment. The hospital in aesthetic space generates an attunement to differences and vulnerabilities, a recognition of complicities, and possibilities of ethical, accountable living that short-circuits the Western-centric dominant order of health. I argue that bringing Turkey into scholarship 1. complicates the North-South and East-West paradigms which are embedded in global health humanities scholarship; 2. surfaces neglected contributions of Turkish writers and artists to Western literature of health during the late Cold War era.; 3. and contributes to histories of neoliberalization and health and imaginations of alternative healthcare due to the increased neoliberalization in Turkey starting from the late 80s.  

The project also gestures towards an understudied area: a hospital-oriented literary criticism and visual cultural study. Although hospitals and medical materials and technologies are among the research interests of disciplines like medical history, anthropology, or sociology; in film and literary studies, their consideration is limited to setting, plot, or theme. Several literary studies tend to focus on health-sick dichotomy and direct their attention to the representation of sick bodies predominantly. Acknowledging the existing literary scholarship, I work across the divide between medicine, literature, and film and explore the exchanges between medical and artistic genres and technologies. The engagement with the hospital from an aesthetic perspective complicates the conventional reliance on objectivity and medical gaze, questions the boundaries between medical, literary, and cinematic genres, and reveals how medicine is a social phenomenon.