Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar`ın şiir eleştirisinde Avrupa merkezlilik

Abstract

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901-62), who was one of the most original writers of modern Turkish literature, especially with his novels and poems, had also contributed to Turkish literary studies by various articles, essays, and his well-known history of the nineteenth-century Turkish literature. In his articles and essays, Tanpınar placed special emphasis on the genre of poetry and interpreted the development of Turkish literature by putting poetry in the center. This thesis aims to analyze Tanpınar’s writings about poetry in general, and Ottoman poetry and Yahya Kemal Beyatlı (1884-1958) in particular, and to explore his conception of fine arts and his Eurocentric approach. In the first part, entitled “An Overview of Tanpınar’s Criticism of Poetry”, a brief chronological outline of the body of his writings about “Criticism”, “Poetry”, “Ottoman poetry”, and “Yahya Kemal” is provided. The second part of the thesis, entitled “Elements of Tanpınar’s Criticism of Poetry”, consists of two subsections: “Critical Interpretation According to Fine Arts” and “Constructing Continuity in Poetic Language: Selectivity”. The first subsection explores Tanpınar’s understanding of poetry as a fine art and his definition of it in terms of the characteristics of the fine arts. The second subsection discusses Tanpınar’s re-construction of a “classical” tradition by an intentional selection of poets from Yunus Emre to Yahya Kemal in the context of poetic language and his Eurocentric perspective. Tanpınar re-constructs this line of continuity by selecting verses, couplets, and poems according to European literatures, especially French literary norms, while valuing them with the conceptions of European arts, and finally making the mentioned line “Europeanized”. At the same time, he “orientalizes” the Ottoman poetic tradition and makes modern Turkish poetry subordinate to it, with the exception of Yahya Kemal.