INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH AND INNOVATION CONGRESS -II
THE SOCIOLOGY OF CONFINEMENT: SOCIAL ANALYSIS OF THE NOVELLAS “ALTINCI KOGUŞ” and “72. KOGUŞ”
The novel is sometimes a summary of the social situation, sometimes the hopes, fears and ideals of the common imagination. In any case, the author reflects the social atmosphere in which he lives in his works. This is how novels gain the quality of documents that shed light on the understanding of society in social sciences. Based on this reality, a reading of society was made in this study through the novella (long story) works of two authors who witnessed their own modernisation processes. The subject of the study is ‘ward life’, or, to use the paradigm of the study, ‘the sociology of confinement’. Anton Chekhov's Ward No 6, which tells the story of a mental hospital in the Russian provinces at the beginning of the 20th century, and Orhan Kemal's Ward 72 in the middle of the century, during the difficult years when the world was going through the hell of war, are discussed within the possibilities of the discipline of sociology of literature and within the framework of the new structuralism paradigm put forward by M. Foucault. Although Chekhov's Ward No 6 is not a prison, it is considered in the same category with Kemal's Ward 72 since it is seen that it is no different from a prison due to the conditions of the period. The characteristics of the society in the process of historical change can also be understood by analysing the lives of individuals who deviate from the legal norms established as well as the upper class and are considered extraordinary. For this purpose, the tendencies in Turkish and Russian modernisation, as two different types of modernisation, are portrayed through the novel heroes who are pushed out of society. The findings on the similarities and differences regarding sociality, their relations with historical reality, and the social design of human emotions in the works are presented with qualitative research method and descriptive analysis technique. It has been observed that the representational dimension of the heroes in the works is closely linked to the world views of the authors; from this point of view, the sociality that constitutes the literary and intellectual identity of the authors and the domination of social institutions reshaped by modernity on the individual have been reached
