The Modernist Will to Totality: Dream Aesthetics and National Allegory

Abstract

This dissertation argues that one of the distinguishing characteristics of modernist literature is its desire to represent the social totality and that some of the significant modernist narrative-formal experiments can be read as attempts to respond to the complex phenomenon of fragmentation witnessed in modernity. The crisis in the representation of totality is presented as a general framework within which different national situations and their literary works can communicate with each other, and the conventional definition of modernism can be broadened accordingly. This study focuses on the formal solutions offered to the mentioned problem in James Joyce’s Ulysses, A.H. Tanpınar’s A Mind at Peace, and Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl. The forms it analyzes extensively are Tanpınar’s dream aesthetics and Hedayat’s allegorical and non-oriented narrative resembling a Möbius band.