Type
Text
Type
Dissertation
Advisor
Tan, E.K. | Harvey, Robert | Petrey, Sandy | Kandiyoti, Dalia.
Date
2016-12-01
Keywords
Comparative literature | Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Crisis, Hannah Arendt, Mahmoud Darwish, Virginia Woolf, World Literature | Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Crisis, Hannah Arendt, Mahmoud Darwish, Virginia Woolf, World Literature
Department
Department of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies
Language
en_US
Source
This work is sponsored by the Stony Brook University Graduate School in compliance with the requirements for completion of degree.
Identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/11401/77202
Publisher
The Graduate School, Stony Brook University: Stony Brook, NY.
Format
application/pdf
Abstract
This dissertation examines the ways in which Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s novel, Huzur (1949), Mahmoud Darwish’s prose-poem Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 (1995), and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) manifest a cognitive landscape of crisis in discursive socio-cultural contexts that provide the reader with a critical awareness of worldliness. It argues that the crisis serves as an overarching theme and a structural and thematic principle in determining the conceptual frameworks of the critical thresholds that these works address. The three authors of my study surpass worldless thresholds designated by the crisis by moving through the idea of home, nation, culture, and singularity, towards a critical awareness of worldliness. Such critical awareness provides them with grounds to challenge the national or hegemonic literature, as well as alerting us to the cross-cultural reading practices. Informed by the works of Henri Bergson, Edward Said, Reinhart Koselleck, Emmanuel Levinas, and Hannah Arendt, this project takes these novels as theories in the form of fiction. The first chapter focuses on Tanpınar’s notion of buhran, crisis with a specific emphasis on the mode of temporal threshold and a state of the mind characterized by a lack of direction, the feeling of homelessness, and by the disintegration of wholeness. It examines how buhran serves as the paradigm and means of becoming worldly. It enables Tanpınar to engage in a dialogue beyond his culture and time period, by designating the crisis of modernity as the connecting link between two uneven temporalities – his own and what constitutes the present of the West. The second chapter explores how the notion of exilic threshold is connected to a “mythical violence†carried out by the sovereign power. It analyzes the methods Darwish employs to move beyond this threshold by minorizing the language, and by employing a critical and exilic consciousness. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s notion of worldliness, the third chapter demonstrates the ways in which the totalitarian characteristics of progressive modernity leads to a “worldlessness†in the temporal threshold of the “no longer and not yet†era Woolf depicted. Focusing on Woolf’s main character, Clarissa Dalloway, I argue that Woolf displays how to re-establish worldliness and create a realm of coexistence based on plurality, and by recognizing the alterity of the other. While this project frames various critical thresholds, and displays an awareness of figurations of worldliness from a cross-cultural perspective, it attempts to pinpoint several conceptual tools that enhance our understanding of how critical consciousness adopted both by the author and the reader shapes and informs the reading practices of world literature. Such critical consciousness should deterritorialize language and collectivity, cross borders, and result in heterogeneity and plurality, while taking into consideration the distinctive socio-historical, temporal and political contexts each of the narratives assign. | 218 pages
Recommended Citation
Akaltun, Evren, "Towards a Critical Awareness of Worldliness: A.H. Tanpınar’s Huzur, Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway | Towards a Critical Awareness of Worldliness: A.H. Tanpınar’s Huzur, Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway" (2016). Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions). 3033.
https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/stony-brook-theses-and-dissertations-collection/3033