Rock, Iced City Model and Home: Selma’s Ankara Ankara Novel Analysis Through Walter Benjamin

In Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu’s novel Ankara (1934), the turbulent periods of social life, starting from the years of the War of Independence and extending to the foundation of the Republic and afterwards, are narrated in the axis of a female hero. Together with Selma, the protagonist of the novel, we read the changes in social life through objects, images, moods and the relationship between Selma and the city. In this article, the novel in question will be analyzed in terms of salvation, the “revolutionary force of the present”, which Walter Benjamin calls “Messianic power”. Reading the Ankara novel as such, made it possible to understand that the “present” is a kind of experience atlas formed by emotional states and current conditions rather than a temporal expression; and that it is relational. The revolutionary power, which Benjamin could find its possibility in objects and dusts, is considered in this article as the transformation of the potential that exists in the present into action.