The Discussions of Underground Literature in Turkey: Concept, Criteria, History

As the history of underground literature goes back to the first literal productions, the emergence of it, as movement comes up to modern and postmodern period. Actually underground literature was a movement which was aiming to reject the dominant system and its all institutions and trying to invert all legal values. In this context, it is a movement in which, any kind of illegal and immoral behaviors could find a place and sexuality, violence, drugs were adopted with nihilistic, anarchist and radical approach. It is also evaluated as a literal movement in which vulgarism, swearing and rudeness were dominant on account of style. The appearance of such a literal movement, no doubt, is related to dealing with alienation in a philosophical sense, miscommunication; asociality and existential problems, and it is also related with the situation of the radical riot to life of the anti-hero who was exhausted with capitalism and lost in the Kafkaesque mazes. In this context, underground literature started to develop only after 1980’s because of historical process difference with Western societies. Especially, after the middle years of 1990’s, social structure, which beat down and pushed the traumas, which 12th September have created, to subliminal in a way and found itself on another platform with the effect of process of global capitalism connection. The complications which was led by the transportation of private life to public sphere and by the situation in which marginal lives and discourses appeared more civilization, alienation, otherization, violence and injustice in income distribution, underground literature has appeared, except for and against canon literature. Under Literature which shows itself with fanzines, forums, in the shape of closed cycles of restricted groups, attracts the attention of many publishers. Many publishers started to press such works. The interest of literal magazines and academic environments in this subject rises. Moreover, underground literature becomes a popular kind paradoxically and this situation washes away some of its “underground” features dramatically. All these cause underground literature subject, which has already been a debated subject, to become more complicated.

Keywords

Underground Literature, Underground Literature in Turkey, The conception of Underground Literature,