Abstract:

The focus of this article is the modern city, as the place where modernity is both structured and also experienced through the practices of everyday life. Grasping the nature of modernity necessitates an understanding of modern city and an analysis of the everyday life in modern city. Novels offer an invaluable opportunity for such an analysis because they are the product of the Modern Age and they display artist’s desire for realism in representing the every day life of the individual in modern city. Three novels of Peyami Safa—one of the early Republican authors who elaborated issues of modernization—which were published between 1923 and 1951, were analyzed with these in mind. These novels were observed to represent Istanbul as an example of the modern city, with fragmentary images associated with turmoil, crowds, noisy trains and cars. An additional observation about the novels is that they portray accidental instances of encounters between the rich and the poor as well as the strong and the weak. Another aspect of the analysis is that, Peyami Safa’s recording of modernity as such is not exclusive to Turkish literature, which is often seen as a product of a belated modernity. On the contrary, Safa’s responses to modern moments have many parallels with those of the West European novelists.

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