METADATA
Title: Spaces and places of modernity and the modern artist in Oğuz Atay’s “Railroad storytellers – A dream”
Vol. 12(2), 2024, pp. 167-184.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.46687/OQTR6968.
Author: Prof Nüzhet Berrin Aksoy, PhD
About the author: Prof Nüzhet Berrin Aksoy, PhD received her BA, MA and PhD from the Department of English Language and Literature at Hacettepe University Ankara, Turkey. Prof. Aksoy worked in the Department of Translation/Interpretation at Hacettepe University as a Junior and Senior lecturer and as department chair until she took an early retirement in 2007 and started to work as senior lecturer and department chair in the Department of English Translation and Interpretation at Atılım University. Prof. Aksoy has researched extensively in the fields of translation studies, English literature, cultural studies and comparative literary studies and published in Internationally-indexed publications such as Babel, and META, Annals of the Ovidius University, Lyuboslovie and Studies in Linguistics, Culture and FLT of the University of Shumen as well as many national refereed journals. Prof. Aksoy has also presented papers at international congresses as invited and key-note speaker. Prof. Aksoy is fluent in English and French.
e-mail: berrin.aksoy@atilim.edu.tr
ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5716-1962
Link: http://silc.fhn-shu.com/issues/2024-2/SILC_2024_Vol_12_Issue_2_167-184_18.pdf
Citation (APA): Aksoy, N. B. (2024). Spaces and places of modernity and the modern artist in Oğuz Atay’s “Railroad storytellers – A dream”. Studies in Linguistics, Culture, and FLT, 12(2), 167-184. https://doi.org/10.46687/OQTR6968.
Abstract: This paper examines Atay’s “Railroad Storytellers - A Dream” in terms of Atay’s modernist experimentation in his depiction of space and spatiality, emphasising his contribution to Turkish literature as a pioneer modernist author. Oğuz Atay’s distinctive and innovative style, which forms his affinities with the early Western modernists, establishes his significant place as a pioneer modernist author in Turkish literature in the 1970s. The concept of ‘house/home’ by Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space (1957, 2014) is instrumental for me as it pertains to the predicament of three storytellers as artists in the nameless and remote railroad station. The narrator of the story and his fellow storytellers gradually sink into disconnection, confusion, misery and poverty in an environment that represents the cold and unwelcoming face of technological modernisation symbolised by the space of the train station. The narrator’s quest for finding a ‘home’ to connect him to his readers and where he could exist as an artist comes to life in his attempt to write a letter to his readers, telling them he is still ‘here’ and asking them where they are. No matter how blighted that effort is since the narrator has no address to send the letters to, the endings for Atay’s story imply a need for connection with his readers expressed in the impossible meeting of the ‘here’ with the ‘where’ in spite or because of the estrangement and alienation of the artist/author in the modern world. Hence, the possibility of space as a ‘home’ for the author/narrator dwindles in the not forthcoming answer to the letter that will never reach its destination.
Keywords: Oğuz Atay, modernism, space, place, home.
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