Siyaset ve modernite: Hannah Arendt, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner

The present dissertation weaves together literature with political theory, creating a conversation between Hannah Arendt, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner. Drawing upon Arendt's critique of modernity, this study lays bare affinities between Arendt and Woolf, with a keen interest in their reflections on modernity, tradition, and history. By setting out to examine such parallels, it also analyzes their common arguments about violence and totalitarianism that illuminate their understanding of politics as well as the role of narrative in the twentieth century. In what follows, this dissertation scrutinizes Arendt's conceptions of the public and the private sphere and then applies these terms to Woolf's novel To The Lighthouse. I shall first consider Mrs Ramsay's worldlessness, exploring the power of narrative in linking the private and the public, and then turn to Arendt's notion of privacy to propose a countervailing argument for her loneliness. This argument will unearth that the household sphere is not only the space of worldlessness but also the shelter of togetherness. The dissertation also contends that Arendt's account of nature resonates in Woolf's novel. In the rest of the study, my purpose is to argue the meaning of the political for Faulkner and to pursue the traces of the possibility of action and freedom in his novel The Sound and the Fury. Focusing on the characters' commitment to the past and their struggle in a capitalist society, this dissertation proposes rethinking Arendt's concepts of the social, labor, loneliness, forgiveness, and freedom in the context of Faulkner's novel.