2009/10/26 by Kürşad Ertuğrul
Social Sciences · #Critical Theory and Philosophy #Populism, Right-Wing Movements #Turkey's Politics and Society
paper · doi:10.1017/s0020743809990109
openalex publication_date 2009/10/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/25
This study gives voice to three ways of becoming modern in the Turkish experience through a reading of the novels of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Oğuz Atay, and Orhan Pamuk. The first possibility, represented by the works of Tanpınar, is more conservative and defensive, concerned with preserving what is considered authentic culture. Anti-individualistic, it nonetheless attempts to appropriate Western culture and the change generated by its impact within “the traditional essence.” The second possibility, represented by the works of Atay, is open ended: it reaches beyond the limitations of the Turkish social-historical domain to create a new individual (and implicitly social) existence while remaining critical of Western “individuality.” The last possibility, represented by the works of Pamuk, expresses the dominant concept of “modernization” in Turkey, which equates modernization with Westernization. Individualization comes to mean replication of “Western individuality.”