Ahmed Nuri | Poetics of Modernity as Crisis. Tragedy and Parody in the Twentieth-Century Turkish Novel

This thesis examines the relationship between Turkish modernity and the twentieth-century Turkish novel. With this aim, it focuses on the strong link between the representations of the individual modernity experiences and the narrative modes employed in six selected novels published between the 1940s and the early 1980s: Ülker Fırtınası “Pleiades Storm” (1944) by Safiye Erol, Huzur “A Mind at Peace” (1949) and Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü “The Time Regulation Institute” (1961) by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Tuhaf Bir Kadın “A Strange Woman” (1971) by Leylâ Erbil, Ölmeye Yatmak “Lying Down to Die” (1973) by Adalet Ağaoğlu, and Sessiz Ev “Silent House” (1983) by Orhan Pamuk. By framing the evolution of the Turkish novel concerning thematic, structural, and agential dimensions of Turkish modernity, this thesis looks at how these novels narrate the existential and moral crises of the protagonists addressed within the socio-historical, cultural, and political circumstances of modernizing Turkey. I term the novels “crisis narratives” of the modernity experience, as each protagonist’s crisis dominates the story, plot, and discourse of each novel and determines its thematic, narrative, and even stylistic and formalistic features.
By comparatively examining the link between their thematic and structural features, this thesis scrutinizes the two predominant narrative modes employed in the novels, particularly tragedy and parody. In exploring the tragic and parodic modes of the novels, this thesis extensively lays bare the sociocultural, ethical, and ideological components of such crises depicted in them. By doing so, this thesis provides insights into the poetics of modernity as a crisis in the twentieth-century Turkish novel, reaching specific understandings of tragedy and parody within Turkish fiction.