Contact
Office address: Schellingstraße 33, 80799 München
Room:
1010
Phone:
+49 (0)89 2180-2103
Email:
m.akcay@lmu.de
Merve Akçay studied Translation and Interpreting Studies at Boğaziçi University, during and after which she gathered experience as a literary and technical translator, conference interpreter and editor. She completed her Master’s in Anglophone Literatures, Cultures and Media at Goethe University Frankfurt with a scholarship from the Johanna Quandt Anniversary Foundation.
The Family Myth in Relational Life Writing: Remediations of the ‘Odyssey’ Schema
Considering family in terms of an ‘imagined community’ necessarily draws attention to the ways that family is made rather than naturally exists. Drawing from the interdisciplinary fields of transcultural memory studies and classical reception studies, I aim to investigate the ways in which ‘family’ as a cultural narrative or myth is performed, negotiated, reproduced and challenged in the ‘Odyssey’ schema and three contemporary works of relational life writing that function both as remediations or receptions of it in differing contexts and as family memoirs, through close reading and comparative analysis.