THESIS

"Novelization, Polyphony and Humor in Nâzım Hikmet's Anti-Colonial Poetry"

(Thesis Advisors: Prof. Talât Halman and Hilmi Yavuz) 

This thesis deals with the functioning of the formal and stylistical devices in Nâzım Hikmet’s “novelized” poems, namely Gioconda and Si-Ya-U (1929), Why Did Benerjee Kill Himself? (1932) and Letters to Taranta-Babu (1935) in the representation of anti-colonialism from the perspective of historical materialism. The departure point of the thesis is the “reading contract” Nâzım Hikmet makes with his readers by categorizing his narrative poems as “novels," and Mikhail Bakhtin’s assertion that all genres are to some extent “novelized” when the novel “dominates” the literary arena. According to Bakhtin, the fundamental transformation in novelized genres is their acquiring the capability of representing the multi-voiced modern society, and their becoming humorous, which leads to the relativization of the homophony dictated by dominant ideologies. This thesis’s claim, thus, is that the novelization of Nâzım Hikmet’s anti-colonial narrative poetry brings along its polyphonization, which renders possible the representation of the conflict between the European high social classes and the colonial people, regarded as “natural worker classes”. This thesis also asserts that humor, also related to the novelization of poetry, serves as the main literary device in the representation of the colonial peoples’ revolution on a symbolical level.