Oğuz Atay's dialogue with the Western canon in The Disconnected

Abstract

Drawing centrally upon the work of the Russian critic Mihail Bakhtin, this study compares Oğuz Atay’s poetics with those of the canonic authors, and demonstrates how he copes with the authority of the past while building a new structure upon it. It also aims to show that the recognition of the impossibility of a language “untainted” by others and the awareness of the echoes from the past is central to The Disconnected, Atay’s masterpiece and most cherished novel. Bakhtinian concepts, such as dialogism, heteroglossia, polyphony and carnival, are employed in revealing the dialogue Atay establishes with his literary “fathers,” such as Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe, Dostoevsky, and Joyce. While one of the objectives of this thesis is to argue that Atay’s response to Turkey’s project of modernity is unique when compared to his contemporaries, its most important endeavour, however, remains to show that The Disconnected is a “world text” and Atay has a well-earned place among other modernist authors in that he draws upon the literary past and delivers it to the present in an enriched form. This comparative study, therefore, focuses not only on the similarities between Atay and other modernists, but also draws the line between him and the authors of the canon in that it shows that the journey Atay takes in The Disconnected is determined by a dialogue between not only the present and the past, but also the East and the West.