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.

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.

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.

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.

Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel

Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel
Author: Joseph Conte
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2019-11-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000766462

Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel suggests that literature after September 11, 2001 reflects the shift from bilateral nation-state politics to the multilateralism of transnational politics. While much of the criticism regarding novels of 9/11 tends to approach these works through theories of personal and collective trauma, this book argues for the evolution of a post-9/11 novel that pursues a transversal approach to global conflicts that are unlikely to be resolved without diverse peoples willing to set aside sectarian interests. These novels embrace not only American writers such as Don DeLillo, Dave Eggers, Ken Kalfus, Thomas Pynchon, and Amy Waldman but also the countervailing perspectives of global novelists such as J. M. Coetzee, Orhan Pamuk, Mohsin Hamid, and Laila Halaby. These are not novels about terror(ism), nor do they seek comfort in the respectful cloak of national mourning. Rather, they are instances of the novel in terror, which recognizes that everything having been changed after 9/11, only the formally inventive presentation will suffice to acknowledge the event’s unpresentability and its shock to the political order.

Pamuk's Istanbul

Pamuk's Istanbul
Author: Pallavi Narayan
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2022-04-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000572056

This book reconstructs Istanbul through the prism of Orhan Pamuk’s fiction. It navigates the multiple selves and layers of Istanbul to present how the city has shaped the writings of Pamuk and has, in turn, been shaped by it. Through everyday objects and architecture, it shows how Pamuk transforms the city into a living museum where different objects converse along with characters to present a rich tapestry across space and time. Further, the monograph explores the formation of communal and literary identity within and around nation-building narratives informed by capitalism and modernization. The book also examines how Pamuk uses the postmodern city to move beyond its postmodern confines, and utilizes the theories and universes of Bakhtin, Benjamin, and Foucault to open up his fiction and radically challenge the idea of the novel. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature, literary theory, museum studies, architecture, and cultural studies, and especially appeal to readers of Orhan Pamuk.

The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Religion

The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Religion
Author: Susan M. Felch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2016-09-12
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1316757269

Each essay in this Companion examines one or more literary texts and a religious tradition to illustrate how we can understand both literature and religion better by looking at them in tandem. Unlike most literature and religion books, which tend to focus on Christianity and take a highly theoretical approach inappropriate for non-specialists, The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Religion offers an accessible treatment of both Dharmic and Abrahamic traditions. It provides close readings of texts rather than surveys of large topics, making it an ideal resource for undergraduate and graduate students of literature and religion.