READING ELİF SHAFAK’S PİNHAN IN LINE WITH THE ELEMENTS OF POSTMODERN FICTION

After the second half of the twentieth century, the developments in the communication and information technologies resulting from the greed of global capitalism, which will never be satisfied, have changed people s lifestyles, world perceptions and consumption habits in terms of both material and spiritual values . The deconstruction of the political, social, philosophical and scientific narratives, which had been fostered and accumulated from The Renaissance and Enlightenment until the end of World War II, revealed new conditions equipped with new perspectives and new perceptions. Inevitably, these changes and transformations affects the art and literature as well. As it comes into existence through reflecting the sociological and psychological evolution of human beings, the novel, among literary genres, becomes the most affected one by these changes and transformations. The place of the novel in which the plots are formed on the basis of causation that initialized reason, logic and science is replaced by the one of which the form, style and techniques begin to change radically through the usage of such literary devices as metafiction, intertextuality, pluralistic approach, subjectivity, parody, popular culture, pastiche and collage. Using the aforementioned techniques and approaches, this new type of novel, called postmodern, shortens the distance between the virtual and the reality, the absolute and the relative, the upper and the subordinate, the high and low culture. In this context, this article dwells on the implicit and explicit postmodern elements in Pinhan (written by Elif Şafak, a prominent writer who welcomed the postmodern style in her carrier), which also embeds references to such concepts as mysticism, feminism, love, homosexuality, modernism, the conflict between the east and the west, and the current social milieu in Turkey.