Representations of Academic Communities in "Dark Academia" Novels
Yağmur Su Kolsal is a PhD student at the Graduate School Practices of Literature in the areas of American Studies and Book Studies. She is also a recipient of the DAAD Graduate School Scholarship. Su's project focuses on novels categorized as "dark academia" and the function of unreliable narration in the portrayals of academia and academic communities in these works. The origins of dark academia (often abbreviated as "DA") as a type of fictional narrative, which can be briefly defined as a sub-genre of the campus novel and the mystery novel, can be traced back to Donna Tartt's 1992 novel The Secret History. The Secret History, in which humanities education at a private liberal arts college forms the backdrop to the premeditated murder of a character by his cohort and close friends, has become the ur-text of the type of narrative in which a murder mystery or another form of mysterious death or disappearance is inextricably connected to the academic setting and DA fiction is prompted by the existence of "dark academia" communities on social media, where academic study is associated with an aesthetic that is based on depictions in the books around which readers create an identity. This dissertation project aims to investigate the role unreliable narrators who uncritically espouse elitist notions about higher education that emphasize its exclusivity to certain groups of individuals on the basis of class, gender, and race play in the establishment of an aesthetic that features highly romanticized depictions of student life and college campuses in "dark academia" fiction. At the current stage of her project, Su plans to include works by Donna Tartt, R. F. Kuang, Leigh Bardugo, Mona Awad, and M. L. Rio, spanning more than 30 years.
Su holds a B.A. degree in English Language Education and an M.A. in English Literature with a thesis titled "Hauntological Engagements With the Haunting House Motif in Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and Helen Oyeyemi's White Is for Witching" from the Middle East Technical University in Turkey. Her research interests include contemporary American literature, the campus novel, popular fiction, Gothic fiction, hauntology, depictions of otherness and alterity in fiction, and literature and social media. In her free time, Su likes to write poetry and creative non-fiction, watch and talk about movies, and see new places.
Betreuerinnen: Prof. Dr. Silvia Schultermandl & Prof. Dr. Corinna Norrick-Rühl