Modernization, memory, and identity: Architecture in the novels of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar and Orhan Pamuk

Based on the thesis that the most manifest reflection of the process of modernization is visible in the city and architecture, and that while architecture is being produced, it simultaneously produces as well, this paper focuses on the central concepts of modernization, memory, and identity in the realm of architecture by considering it as a narrative layer in the novels of two writers, Ahmed Hamdi Tanpınar and Orhan Pamuk, both of whom had a keen interest in architecture. In the first chapter, in which the ambiguity of the concept of space and the perception of architectural space are examined, the notion that greater value is attributed to the subject by considering space phenomenologically, thereby making it possible to study the relationship between architecture and the human being, is conceptualized within the framework of the novels. In the second chapter, the changes that took place in architecture during the modernization process in Turkey, and how these were reflected in the lives and novels of Tanpınar and Pamuk, especially with respect to the notions of privacy and individualization, are treated in depth. In the third chapter, the effect of architecture on the patterns of remembering and forgetting in connection with the act of seeing is emphasized; also, the role of memory through the medium of architecture in the construction of collective memory, which is transferred from the memories of the authors to fiction and then from fiction to the reader, is discussed and examined. In the last chapter, attention is drawn to how Tanpınar and Pamuk treated the construction of identity in conjunction with both modernization and patterns of remembering and forgetting based upon the changing dynamics of structure and space, and how the concepts of "self" and "other" were embodied in architecture. Keywords: realms of memory, literature and architecture, identity, memory, modernization, collective memory, Tanpınar, Pamuk