ABSTRACT
In the debates concerning Turkish literature and culture, one inevitably encounters questions that evolve along the axis of presumably stable notions such as East/West, modernity/tradition, and secularism/Islam. A common metaphor employed to describe the geopolitical position of Turkey is the inflexible ‘bridge metaphor’, which assumes two mutually exclusive worlds that can only come into contact through the assimilation of one culture by the other, or a severe clash of civilizations. Although the bridge metaphor seems to take dialogue as a foundation, and has a positive overtone, it relies on ahistorical and essentialist identity models privileging genealogical notions of origin and purity.
