Kaya S. The city as a myth in Ukrainian and Turkish prose of postmodernity: features of the author and national representations

The dissertation aims to define the characteristic aspects of the author's and national representations of the city-myth in the Ukrainian and Turkish prose of the late twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries. The object of research is the novels of modern Ukrainian (Malva Landa by Yuriy Vynnychuk, Love in the Baroque style by Volodymyr Danylenko, The City with Chimeras by Oles Ilchenko, The Living Sound by Andrii Kokotiukha) and Turkish (The White Castle, My Name Is Red, The Black Book, Silent House, and Snow by Orhan Pamuk) urban literature. These texts are selected owing to the following factors: the common tendency to mythologize the topos of the city; the connection of urban themes of various genres with a set of problems of national, personal, or artistic identity; the affiliation of the authors to the generation of the postmodern era writers, which made it possible to trace the author's variants (models) of the image of the city-myth through the prism of acceptance or distancing from the poetics characteristic of this era; the role of authors in the formation of the paradigm of artistic urbanism in national literary traditions. The subject of research is the mythological aspect of the image of the city, the tradition and innovation in the creation of the mythology of the city, the correlation of authorial, national, and world fundamentals in Ukrainian and Turkish urban prose at the turn of the twenty-first century. The purpose of the dissertation is to establish the common and differences in the author and national representations of the city as a myth in the works of Turkish and Ukrainian prose of the postmodern era.