Intellectual Crisis in Baydur’s Plays

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An intellectual is the one who needs to accept the responsibility to enlighten his/her society and leads through critically reasoning out the problematic sides of his/her society with his/her intellectual gift and knowledge. For this duty, s/he is supposed to be sensitive toward the society s/he is responsible to. However, the poor conditions at times in history, keep the intellectual away from his/her duty. Memet Baydur, lived in Turkey and various countries between 1951 and 2001, is a literary man who defines himself as an ‘intellectual’ and most of the time harshly and ironically criticizes the intellectual community he belongs to – in his own words, “that he originated from”. Rather recognized by his plays, Baydur also worked on essays, translations and stories. Being one of the leading playwrights who produced the most literary work in the period after 1980, he found the opportunity to observe the hard conditions and depression of the period not just from the inside but also outside the country and formed the main themes of his plays on the intellectual figures that the period of the military coup had created. In line with Baydur’s plays, shaping the path we follow we attempt to analyze the profile of the intellectual that the 1980 military coup produced.

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Intellectual , Lemon , Cumhuriyet Kızı , Maskeli Süvari , the Military Coup in 12 September 1980

Mediterranean Journal Of Humanities

299

Mediterranean Journal Of Humanities