Power dynamics, social variability, and perspectives on belief and religion in the context of genetic structuralism in the trilogy of Dağın Öte Yüzü by Yaşar Kemal and The Spider’s House by Paul Bowles

This paper examines the colonization of the communities in Yaşar Kemal’s Dağın Öte Yüzü trilogy and Paul Bowles’ The Spider House by their own legal and societal systems through Lucien Goldmann’s genetic structuralist method within postcolonial theory. In Bowles’ piece, the self-colonization process occurs during the community’s decolonization period while the self-colonization in Kemal’s trilogy takes place as a result of the direct consequences of the feudal system in the 1950s Republic period. Most of the researches that have been conducted on these works focus on the character analysis or the independence process. This study aims to highlight the distortion in a community during the independence period as well as inconsistent relations and contradictions in a community that has not been literally colonized. The elements of self-colonization in the communities include discriminatory points of view in power relations, social variables as well as belief and religion perspectives. The early years of both writers coincide with their countries’ transition periods. The intellectuals that they have been inspired by enables Kemal and Bowles to merge in terms of their world-view and ideology they use in literary languages. It is observed that both authors use writing as a means of reaction to mirror their periods’ main issues.