Rampant Modernism and its Cityscapes: Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz, Robert Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar's Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü
Open Access
- Author:
- Kismet Bell, Ipek
- Graduate Program:
- Comparative Literature
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 06, 2011
- Committee Members:
- Djelal Kadir, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Djelal Kadir, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Nergis Erturk Lennon, Committee Member
Martina Kolb, Committee Member
Daniel Leonhard Purdy, Committee Member
Alan M Sica, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Modernism
the modern city
social modernity
Austrian literature
German literature
Alfred Döblin
Turkish literature
Robert Musil
Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar - Abstract:
- This study investigates the nature of literary Modernism and social modernity through three modernist novels that represent analogous historical ruptures and conditions in early twentieth-century Vienna, Berlin, and Istanbul. Focusing on Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1930, 1932, 1943) by Robert Musil, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) by Alfred Döblin, and Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü (1954, 1961) by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, I engage in a comparative study of socio-historical and cultural symptoms, manifestations, and consequences of Austrian, German, and Turkish modernisms as dramatized in these novels. As a whole, this project seeks to contribute to the critical study of Modernism and modernity in general, and to the study of alternative Modernisms and modernities in particular. The city is often a stage for modernization as manifested in literary Modernism. Each of these novels dramatizes modern(izing) life in the authors’ respective cities. Each chapter of this study explores one of various specificities of modernity in each city (Vienna, Berlin, Istanbul)—and, metonymically, each culture—as they are translated into/by the narrative of these modernist authors. I read the modern city in terms of its inherent contradictions and as analogous to Modernism, with its concomitant paradoxes and ironies, where I define irony in its modernist iterations as a simultaneously anarchic, subversive, and constructive mode of philosophico-critical self-reflection. Musil, Döblin, and Tanpınar create out of this trinity—the city, modernity, irony—these novels as allegories of Modernism and as sites of ironic self-reflection. Furthermore, the problematic relationship between modernity and religion as it plays out in the urban settings of these novels portrays religion as yet another dysfunctional institution of modernity. This comparative study brings together three authors and three novels which have not been read side by side before, and thereby contributes to the growing recognition of multiple modernities.