Postmodern stylistics of Elif Shafak’s novel “Mirrors of the City” (1999)

The article is dedicated to the analysis of the poetological features of the early novel “Mirrors of the City” (1999) by the well-known Turkish writer Elif Shafak. The article argues that this novel is written in a postmodernist style, which dominated the literary field of Turkey in the late 20th and early 21st centuries and subsequently significantly changed the artistic process in the country. The postmodern vision of the world as a text determines the entire structure of the work. Reality and the characters existing within it are textualized, turning into “one-dimensional” people, people “without qualities”, “sliding” in the boundless space of the postmodern text. Such characters are characterized by a “split” consciousness and the endless donning of masks of other people with their own “empty” essence. The aim of the study is to prove that the artistic strategies of the novel are based on postmodern schizoanalysis and deconstruction, which determine its style. In the article, these strategies are examined at the plot-compositional level. The scholarly novelty of the research lies in the fact that the novel under consideration by E. Shafak is becoming an object of analytical study for the first time in domestic Turkological literary studies. For the first time, this novel structure is analyzed from the perspective of deconstructed simulational images of characters, as well as archetypal images of home and family, which gives an idea of the author’s postmodern style. As a result, it is proven that the poetics and plot of the work fit into the postmodern paradigm of Turkish literature, at the origins of which stands E. Shafak.