AN INTERTEXTUAL APPROACH TO COETZEE’S FOE AND KULİN’S HANDAN

Though the history of intertextuality goes back to ancient times, it was officially coined in 1967 by Bulgarian-French literary critic Julia Cristeva. Intertextuality is a postmodern literary tool and asserts that there is no unique and independent text. Every text is connected to each other through some intertextual relations particularly in the form of allusion, quotation, plagiarism, pastiche and parody. For this paper, the methodological approaches of three literary critics, namely Gerard Genette, Kubilay Akyulum and Gonca Alpaslan on intertextuality, set up the basis of the study. Accordingly, J. M. Coetzee's novel Foe and Ayşe Kulin's novel Handan are evaluated through their intertextual relations with the previous works that inspire them. It has been put forward that Coetzee's Foe is an allusive and indirect intertextual form of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. However, there is a direct and overt intertextual relationship between Halide Edib Adıvar's Handan and Kulin's novel that have the identical title and name of heroine with Adıvar's. As a last remark, through postmodern intertextuality, both Coetzee's Foe and Kulin's Handan revisit and question the ontological bases of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Adıvar's Handan.