TEXTUAL STRUCTURES IN LE PAYSAN DE PARIS D’ARAGON AND GALATA AND PERA D’İLHAN BERK

Abstract

Cities have always influenced writers, artists and philosophers and reflected people’s passions since hundreds of years. Two prominent examples of this are Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926) and İlhan Berk’s Galata (1985) and Pera (1990) which reflect a modern city in two different cultures. Louis Aragon’s work displays the daily life in Paris in 1925 with a surrealist vision and establishes a modern city mythology. İlhan Berk who admits to being influenced by Aragon’s display of a modern city reflects two of the oldest districts in Istanbul Galata and Pera in a continuity from the Byzantine age to the present within an enriched text. Both writers through a totally subjective perspective and outside the boundaries’ of traditional writing methods have a formed a text that is multilayered, multi-vocal and a visual text based on abstraction