Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy

Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy
Author: Erdag Göknar
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2013-02-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1136164286

Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy is the first critical study of all of Pamuk’s novels, including the early untranslated work. In 2005 Orhan Pamuk was charged with "insulting Turkishness" under Article 301 of the Turkish penal code. Eighteen months later he was awarded the Nobel Prize. After decades of criticism for wielding a depoliticized pen, Pamuk was cast as a dissident through his trial, an event that underscored his transformation from national literateur to global author. By contextualizing Pamuk’s fiction into the Turkish tradition and by defining the literary and political intersections of his work, Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy rereads Pamuk's dissidence as a factor of the form of his novels. This is not a traditional study of literature, but a book that turns to literature to ask larger questions about recent transformations in Turkish history, identity, modernity, and collective memory. As a corrective to common misreadings of Pamuk’s work in its international reception, Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy applies various analytical lenses to the politics of the Turkish novel, including gender studies, cultural translation, historiography, and Islam. The book argues that modern literature that confronts representations of the nation-state, or devlet, with those of Ottoman, Islamic, and Sufi contexts, or din, constitute "secular blasphemies" that redefine the politics of the Turkish novel. Concluding with a meditation on conditions of "untranslatability" in Turkish literature, this study provides a comprehensive and critical analysis of Pamuk’s novels to date.

Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy

Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy
Author: Erdağ M. Göknar
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2013
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0415505372

This book examines the literary politics of Orhan Pamuk's novels within the framework of contestations over "Turkishness," Islam, and secularization. Moving beyond a traditional study of literature, this book turns to literature to ask larger questions about Turkish history, identity, collective memory, and cultural practice. It concludes with an interview with Orhan Pamuk.

Nomadologies

Nomadologies
Author: Erdağ M. Göknar
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9781933527871

Moments lived between Turkey and America come together in this debut collection by the award-winning translator of Orhan Pamuk.

Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature

Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature
Author: Gloria Fisk
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2018-02-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0231544820

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.

Earth and Ashes

Earth and Ashes
Author: Atiq Rahimi
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
Total Pages: 68
Release: 2010-08-10
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1590513924

"You know, father, sorrow can turn to water and spill from your eyes, or it can sharpen your tongue into a sword, or it can become a time bomb that, one day, will explode and destroy you" Earth and Ashes is the spare, powerful story of an Afghan man, Dastaguir, trying desperately to reach his son Murad, who has left his village to earn a living working at a mine. In the meantime the village has been bombed by the Russian army, and Dastaguir, with his newly-deaf grandson Yassin in tow, must reach Murad to tell him of the carnage. The old man is beset on all sides by sorrow, that of his grandson, who cannot understand, that of his son, who does not yet know, and his own, made even crueler by the message he must deliver. Atiq Rahimi, whose reputation for writing war stories of immense drama and intimacy began with this, his first novel, has managed to condense centuries of Afghan history into a short tale of three very different generations. But he has also created a universal story about fathers and sons, and the terrible strain inflicted on those bonds of family during the unpredictable carnage of war.

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Orhan Pamuk

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Orhan Pamuk
Author: Sevinç Türkkan
Publisher: Modern Language Association
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2017-10-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1603293205

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.

Bernard Lonergan’s Third Way of the Heart and Mind

Bernard Lonergan’s Third Way of the Heart and Mind
Author: John Raymaker
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 183
Release: 2016-09-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 076186833X

Today the world is confronted with many religious wars and the migrations of millions of persons due to these conflicts. There is a need for informed dialog as to the roots of the conflicts and ways of addressing these in ways that speak to peoples’ minds and hearts. This is what this book attempts to do from the viewpoint of major religious and ethical thinkers. The book relies on Bernard Lonergan’s foundational method to address problems systematically with a view to achieve breakthroughs in our openness to one another. The book appeals to the teachings of the Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammad, relying on the mystical and insights of these religious founders as well as those of dozens of their followers so as to find commonalities that can build bridges of mercy. A global secularity ethics plays a leading role in this book’s bridging efforts.

Orhan Pamuk

Orhan Pamuk
Author: Taner Can
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2017-07-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 383827007X

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.

A Mind at Peace

A Mind at Peace
Author: Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar
Publisher: Archipelago
Total Pages: 583
Release: 2011-03-22
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1935744194

A “masterpiece . . . one of the 20th century’s notable literary love stories and cultural watersheds”—from Turkey’s most influential writers (Los Angeles Times) A young man comes-of-age in a rapidly-changing Istanbul circa the 1930s, grappling with childhood trauma but finding relief in literature, family, and love “The greatest novel ever written about Istanbul.” —Orhan Pamuk Surviving the childhood trauma of his parents’ untimely deaths in the early skirmishes of World War I, Mümtaz is raised and mentored in Istanbul by his cousin Ihsan and his cosmopolitan family of intellectuals. Having lived through the tumultuous cultural revolutions following the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of the early Turkish Republic, each is challenged by the difficulties brought about by such rapid social change. The promise of modernization and progress has given way to crippling anxiety rather than hope for the future. Fragmentation and destabilization seem the only certainties within the new World where they now find themselves. Mümtaz takes refuge in the fading past, immersing himself in literature and music. But when he falls in love with Nuran, a complex woman with demanding relatives, he is forced to confront the challenges of the World at large. Can their love save them from the turbulent times and protect them from disaster—or will inner obsessions, along with powerful social forces seemingly set against them, tear the couple apart? A Mind at Peace, originally published in 1949 is a magnum opus, a Turkish Ulysses and a lyrical homage to Istanbul. With an innate awareness of how dueling cultural mentalities can lead to the distress of divided selves, Tanpinar gauges this moment in history by masterfully portraying its register on the layered psyches of his Istanbulite characters.

Displacing Fictions of Orhan Pamuk

Displacing Fictions of Orhan Pamuk
Author: Hande Gürses
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2023-11-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1793625778

Displacing Fictions of Orhan Pamuk: Beyond the Bridge questions the prevailing relevance and violence of the bridge metaphor for literature through new readings of Orhan Pamuk. This book argues that despite its association with connection, dialogue, and reconciliation, the bridge is an inherently violent structure that controls movement by regulating it. Drawing on deconstruction and Derrida, the author argues for a rethinking of the intrinsic connection between the bridge and the writings of Orhan Pamuk. Exploring Pamuk’s significance as an author of the world literature canon, this book investigates the history and theory of the discipline as a bridge. Identifying new metaphors in Pamuk’s work, Hande Gürses shows the political potential of moving beyond the bridge. As people, lands, and ideas keep moving, Displacing Fictions of Orhan Pamuk argues for an urgent need for new metaphors to understand and represent the realities of our contemporary world.