Orhan Pamuk And The Good Of World Literature

When Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, he was honored as a builder of bridges across a dangerous chasm. By rendering his Turkish characters and settings familiar where they would otherwise seem troublingly foreign, and by speaking freely against his authoritarian state, he demonstrated a variety of literary greatness that testified also to the good literature can do in the world. Gloria Fisk challenges this standard for canonization as “world literature” by showing how poorly it applies to Pamuk. Reading the Turkish novelist as a case study in the ways Western readers expand their reach, Fisk traces the terms of his engagement with a literary market dominated by the tastes of its Anglophone publics, who received him as a balm for their anxieties about Islamic terrorism and the stratifications of global capitalism. Fisk reads Pamuk’s post-9/11 novels as they circulated through this audience, as rich in cultural capital as it is far-flung, in the American English that is global capital’s lingua franca. She launches a polemic against Anglophone readers’ instrumental use of literature as a source of crosscultural understanding, contending that this pervasive way of reading across all manner of borders limits the globality it announces, because it serves the interests of the Western cultural and educational institutions that produce it. Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature proposes a new way to think about the uneven processes of translation, circulation, and judgment that carry contemporary literature to its readers, wherever they live.

It is April 1900, in the Levant, on the imaginary island of Mingheria-the twenty-ninth state of the Ottoman Empire-located in the eastern Mediterranean between Crete and Cyprus. Half the population is Muslim, the other half are Orthodox Greeks, and tension is high between the two. When a plague arrives-brought either by Muslim pilgrims returning from the Mecca or by merchant vessels coming from Alexandria-the island revolts. To stop the epidemic, the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II sends his most accomplished quarantine expert to the island-an Orthodox Christian. Some of the Muslims, including followers of a popular religious sect and its leader Sheikh Hamdullah, refuse to take precautions or respect the quarantine. And then a murder occurs. As the plague continues its rapid spread, the Sultan sends a second doctor to the island, this time a Muslim, and strict quarantine measures are declared. But the incompetence of the island's governor and local administration and the people's refusal to respect the bans doom the quarantine to failure, and the death count continues to rise. Faced with the danger that the plague might spread to the West and to Istanbul, the Sultan bows to international pressure and allows foreign and Ottoman warships to blockade the island. Now the people of Mingheria are on their own, and they must find a way to defeat the plague themselves. Steeped in history and rife with suspense, Nights of Plague is an epic story set more than one hundred years ago, with themes that feel remarkably contemporary.

'I read a book one day, and my whole life was changed.' So begins The New Life, Orhan Pamuk's fabulous road novel about a young student who yearns for the life promised by a dangerously magical book. On his remarkable journey, he falls in love, abandons his studies, turns his back on home and family, and embarks on restless bus trips through the provinces, in pursuit of an elusive vision. This is a wondrous odyssey, laying bare the rage of an arid heartland, from the bestselling author of My Name is Red and Snow. In coffee houses with black-and-white TV sets, on buses where passengers ride watching B-movies on flickering screens, in wrecks along the highway, in paranoid fictions with spies as punctual as watches, the magic of Pamuk's creation comes alive. From a writer compared to Kafka, Nabakov, Calvino and García Márquez, The New Life documents the spiritual journey of a young student, who leaves his family behind in the name of love, life and literature.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006, Orhan Pamuk is Turkey's preeminent novelist and an internationally recognized figure of letters. Influenced by both Turkish and European literature, his works interrogate problems of modernity and of East and West in the Turkish context and incorporate the Ottoman legacy linguistically and thematically. The stylistic and thematic aspects of his novels, his intriguing use of intertextual elements, and his characters' metatextual commentaries make his work rewarding in courses on world literature and on the postmodern novel. Pamuk's nonfiction writings extend his themes of memory, loss, personal and political histories, and the craft of the novel. Part 1, "Materials," provides biographical background and introduces instructors to translations and critical scholarship that will elucidate Pamuk's works. In part 2, "Approaches," essays cover topics that support teachers in a range of classrooms, including Pamuk's use of the Turkish language, the political background to Pamuk's novels, the politics of translation and aesthetics, and Pamuk's works as world literature.

Istanbul, through the mind of its most celebrated writer ** PRE-ORDER NIGHTS OF PLAGUE, THE NEW NOVEL FROM ORHAN PAMUK ** Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 'A declaration of love.' Sunday Times 'A fascinating read for anyone who has even the slightest acquaintance with this fabled bridge between east and west.' The Economist 'An irresistibly seductive book' Jan Morris, Guardian In a surprising and original blend of personal memoir and cultural history, Turkey's most celebrated novelist, Orhan Pamuk, explores his home of more than fifty years. What begins as a portrait of the artist as a young man becomes a shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world's greatest cities. Beginning in the family apartment building where he was born, and still lives, Pamuk uses his family secrets to show how they were typical of their time and place. He then guides us through Istanbul's monuments and lost paradises, dilapidated Ottoman villas, back streets and waterways, and introduces us to the city's writers, artists and murderers. Like Joyce's Dublin and Borges' Buenos Aires, Pamuk's Istanbul is a triumphant encounter of place and sensibility, beautifully written and immensely moving.

This collection of essays brings together scholarly examinations of a writer who—despite the prestige that the Nobel Prize has earned him—remains controversial with respect to his place in the literary tradition of his home country. This is in part because the positioning of Turkey itself in relation to the cultural divide between East and West has been the subject of a debate going back to the beginnings of the modern Turkish state and earlier. The present essays, written mostly by literary scholars, range widely across Pamuk’s novelistic oeuvre, dealing with how the writer, often adding an allegorical level to the personages depicted in his experimental narratives, portrays tensions such as those between Western secularism and traditional Islam and different conceptions of national identity.

Explores existential and political themes in Orhan Pamuk's work and investigates the apparent contradictions in an arena where Islam and democracy are often seen as opposing and irreconcilable terms. Existential themes delve into literary nuances in Pamuk that discuss love, happiness, suffering, memory and death.