A Distinct Flanerie: Roleplaying and Affective Responses to the City in Resat Nuri Guntekin's Miskinler Tekkesi

Abstract

A significant response to the urban experience of Istanbul in the early decades of Republican Turkish literature (1923-1950s), is the expression of pride for the past. Pride, during this era of change, indicated an individual's coming to terms with the loss of the empire and its prosperous days. As the profile of Istanbul changed with the demolition of old buildings and Europeanization, prominent flaneur figures, who were intellectuals familiar with European culture, appeared in canonical Turkish writing. Contemporary criticism interpreted their search for an idealized past in the city as an attempt to assert an original voice. This article examines a different flaneur; one with distinctive affective responses that are not pride. Reading a late-Ottoman panhandler as flaneur figure in Re & scedil;at Nuri Guntekin's Miskinler Tekkesi (1946) shows how the character undermines pride by emphasizing his inability to acknowledge the loss of the empire, manifested in the feature of huzun.