Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE LITERATURE AND CULTURE RESEARCHES, cilt.9, sa.1, ss.1-13, 2026 (TRDizin)
This article re-reads Charles Dickens’ “Night Walks” (1860) through the lens of object-oriented ontology, arguing that Dickens’s nocturnal dérives through Victorian London anticipate a posthuman sensitivity to objects, environments, and withdrawn forms of being. While traditionally interpreted as a piece of urban social commentary or journalism, “Night Walks” also enacts an encounter with the city as a nonhuman agent, one that exerts affective, ethical, and ontological pressure on the wandering subject. Dickens' attention to streets, urban architecture, and bodily dispossession destabilizes anthropocentric hierarchies, presenting both people and things as part of a flat ontology in which no entity is ontologically privileged. This article explores how inanimate urban elements acquire narrative agency and how marginalized human figures are rendered as withdrawn objects, blurring the distinction between the sentient and the material. By foregrounding Dickens’ epistemic humility, that is his repeated acknowledgment of what he cannot know or fully perceive, the paper positions “Night Walks” as an early experiment in literary object-oriented thinking. In doing so, it reveals how the essay foreshadows contemporary debates around subjectivity, visibility, and the ethical stakes of living among withdrawn and unknowable others