ABSTRACT

Arabesk is a trademark of popular culture in Turkey. At its foundation lie injuries of class, emotional wounds that society inflicts on people’s sense of dignity and freedom. Literature on arabesk has long underemphasized this salient fact. A syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis of the narrative structure in thirty melodramas shows that the agony around which arabesk stories unfolds is rooted in class conflict. This study also reveals remarkable parallels between depictions of love in arabesk films from decades ago and the lower classes’ imagination of love today. Thereby, it provides confirmation of the importance of assessing the works of popular culture accurately if we are to better understand the psyche of their target audience in Turkey (and elsewhere in the capitalist world), which is primarily the subaltern segment of society.

摘要

阿拉贝斯克是土耳其流行文化的商标。其基础是阶级的伤害，是社会对人们的尊严和自由感造成的情感伤害。长期以来，关于阿拉伯式花纹的文献都没有强调这一突出事实。对 30 部情节剧中的叙事结构进行的组合式和范式分析表明，阿拉贝斯克故事所围绕的痛苦根源于阶级冲突。这项研究还揭示了阿拉伯文中对爱情的描述之间的显着相似之处几十年前的电影和今天下层对爱情的想象。因此，它证实了准确评估流行文化作品的重要性，如果我们要更好地了解土耳其（以及资本主义世界其他地方）的目标受众的心理，主要是社会的底层部分。