Peripheral Modernisms and Parody of the Bildungsroman: A Comparative Case Study on Italo Svevo and A. H. Tanpınar

ABSTRACT This article offers a comparative reading of Italo Svevo and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s mock-development novels in light of the history of economic development in Italy and Turkey and their trajectories of integration into global capitalism. These authors from the semi-peripheries of Euromodernity employ strikingly similar modernist techniques in order to unsettle the bildungsroman and its humanist ideals. This article argues that the farcical use of psychoanalysis as a thematic attack on the unity of the subject, chronopathology in both form and content, and parody in style, situation, and plot represent peripheral narrative strategies developed as a response to being always already late vis-a-vis the hegemonic core culture. The classical bildungsroman is comically distorted and creatively adapted to the peripheral condition, becoming a key vehicle for reflecting on disintegrated subject positions, temporal shifts, untimely interruptions, and discordances. The form is simultaneously subverted and creatively adapted to the peripheral condition, reflecting the inevitable encounter with the hegemonic culture and the nation-state.