Department of Comparative Literature

Ends of Language in the Anthropocene: Narratives of Environmental Destruction in Turkish, Arabic, and Arab-Anglophone Speculative Fiction

My dissertation, entitled “Ends of Language in the Anthropocene: Narratives of Environmental Destruction in Turkish, Arabic, and Arab-Anglophone Speculative Fiction” addresses the lack of critical inquiry into the ethics and aesthetics of eco-fiction from the Middle East. Her research engages with scholarship in the fields of environmental humanities, postcolonial studies, and feminist theory. Authors studied include Latife Tekin, Hassan Blasim, and Ahmad Naji, among others. Her article “A View from the Moon: Allegories of Representation in Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm and H. G. Wells” was published in Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics. Merve is also a translator of academic books and articles on literary theory, history, and feminism from English into Turkish.