Kaitlin Staudt

This article addresses a phenomenon which literary critics frequently suggest might not exist: the Turkish modernist novel. In an article on modernism and the Turkish novel, Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk programmatically claims: in Turkey, “we did not have modernism in the true sense of the word.” Emphasizing stream of consciousness techniques, fragmented narratives, and a limited period of emergence, he points to a laundry list of modernism’s standard definitional features, all of which he claims are not appropriate for understanding the development of the Turkish novel. However, a deeper look into the Turkish novel of the early twentieth century reveals that these features are, in fact, present in the fiction Pamuk is addressing. Not only is novelist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s writing full of stream of consciousness techniques and fragmentary narratives, but novelists writing in earlier decades such as Peyami Safa (1899–1961) experiment with representations of temporality and visual culture in their fiction. This discrepancy between the presence of aesthetic features understood as modernist elsewhere in conjunction with critical readings of the Turkish modernist novel as an absence or lack offers up a new way to engage questions of modernism’s relation to modernity following the field’s global turn. This article first takes up the disputed existence of the Turkish modernist novel as a means of exploring why it is described as lacking in the Turkish context despite a persistent recognition of Turkish modernity within historical and sociological scholarship. I am interested in how this discourse surrounding the lack of a Turkish modernist novel illustrates the ways in which the history of modernization as a state-sponsored project in Turkey shapes how literary scholars and authors have defined the modern, and consequently literary modernism, in the Turkish context. In particular, I explore how practices of defining modernism in relation to modernity, namely as the cultural or “aesthetic domain of modernity” make apparent the ideological stakes of reading certain authors as modernist—or not—within Turkish literary criticism. Turkish literary criticism, written by poets, novelists, and scholars, offers a compelling insight into the ways in which literary modernism has been conceived globally beyond the Anglo-European academy. As such, critical writing is particularly useful to the project of global modernisms as it reveals the ways in which the state-sponsored processes of modernization have shaped discourses around literature and literary modernism in locations where modernity was defined and cultivated self-consciously through state initiatives.