Modern Turkey, Real Time, and Other Functional Fabrications in Tanpinar’s The Time Regulation Institute

This article is an attempt to examine temporality in Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s The Time Regulation Institute against the background of the historical transformation of indigenous “temporal culture” in the late Ottoman era. While Tanpınar was in many ways a product of that process, in The Time Regulation Institute he draws on Henri Bergson to criticize the Kemalist flattening and standardizing of both time and identity. Instead of the alienated and soulless time of the modern state he offers a composite, more personal time that would allow one to change without losing one’s self in the process.