Why Turks don't like Orhan Pamuk (original) (raw)
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ORHAN PAMUK, AN INTELLECTUAL, PIONEER, AND NOBEL PRIZED TURKISH WRITER
Orhan Pamuk is a well-known Turkish novelist in the contemporary world literature. He writes his novels in the Turkish Language. However, his novels were translated into more than 60 languages of the world today. He has a unique style and his most important themes are conflict and confluence of the West and Islam, and the argumentative issues of identity. He portrays his characters genuinely, as he meets them throughout his life, regardless of whether his heroes look like him or not. He does his best to identify them. He believes that the history of the novel is simply the historical background of human freedom. Up to now, only eleven novels of his literary works were translated into English. He has got many prizes for literature, for instance, in 2005, he was granted the Peace Prize for creative writing of novel in Germany, and in 2006, he has won the Nobel Prize for literature, as well as in the same year, he was selected in the United States of America as one of the 100 most effective people in the world, who shape the universe by speaking up. This paper will discuss Pamuk's own personal life, his style of writing and the themes of his novels as well as what kind of character he is dealing with. It also tells the story of Pamuk when he talked to a Swiss Magazine about the killing of Kurds and the Armenian Genocide.
ORHAN PAMUK, AS A POLITICAL DISSIDENT WRITER IN ENGLISH
English Studies International Research Journal, 2016
World Literature is an increasingly influential subject in literary studies, which has led to the reframing of contemporary ideas of `national literatures`, language and translation. This era of globalization is fast becoming the preferred term for describing the current times. It comprises the political, economical, social, cultural and literature aspects too. Orhan Pamuk as a global writer in Turkish literature, is the first one ever to emerge from his country, known for his epic, multifaceted stories in which the protagonist is often caught between two worlds. Orhan Pamuk, is a different writer that means he may have already written a number of epic novels but every time he comes up with a new book, a debate resumes whether its best work of the winner of 2006 Nobel Prize for literature. Pamuk uses secularism as an analytical tool to understand the politics of Turkey through his novels which comprises of its historical, cultural, social and Turkish identity issues. Pamuk has also taken on taboo topics in Turkey, like the alleged Armenian genocide in the 1990s and the massacre of Kurdish separatists that led the government in 2005, to sue him under Article 301 of the constitution for defaming the Turkish state. The charges were soon dropped but the experience solidified his position as a controversial literary figure within the Turkish psyche. He`s written about deep-rooted tensions between East and West and how Istanbul and Turkey have changed over the last few decades. So, Pamuk as an internationally acclaimed author fits in this context perfectly.
If it is true that we must account for [a writer's] work on the basis of his condition, it must also be borne in mind that his condition is not only that of a man in general but precisely that of a writer as well. (Sartre, Caute, and Frechtman 2005, 57) Political commitment, however revolutionary it may seem, functions in a counter-revolutionary way so long as the writer experiences his solidarity with the proletariat only in the mind and not as a producer. (Benjamin 1983, 495) Orhan Pamuk is often described in Anglophone reviews, and not always with disparaging, Anglo-saxon suspicion, as a "clever," "cerebral" or "intellectual" writer.
Writing as if in the Center: World Literature and Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City
Turkish Academic Studies, 2020
The scholarship on world literature has often used a center/periphery model and analyzed how Orhan Pamuk’s works have been received by different cultures, especially the Western. Rather than analyzing Pamuk’s reception in other cultures, this study will examine how Pamuk overlooks and even sometimes undermines the hierarchies that shape the international literary domain by writing “as if in the center.” As a case study, a close reading of Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City (İstanbul: Hatıralar ve Şehir, 2003) will be given and the narrative techniques that Pamuk uses to upend the center/periphery dynamics will be examined. This article argues that Pamuk transforms elements that threatened to marginalize Istanbul, such as the Western gaze, into sources that nourish his artistic vision that endows Istanbul with a central status. The first section demonstrates that although Istanbul was marginalized within the international realm, Pamuk describes the act of writing as a means to endow Istanbul with a central status. It points out that Pamuk generates his vision of the city through a process that this study calls interweaving or artistic translation. The second section shows that the writer uses different mediums such as photography and painting to foreground the complexity of the city. Furthermore, it will claim that Ara Güler’s photos that are used throughout Istanbul further enriches Pamuk’s work by not always confirming Pamuk’s observations and sometimes even contradicting with them. The final section examines Pamuk’s perspectives on the Western gaze. Pamuk notes that the European gaze becomes a source of nourishment rather than a threat. He writes about the shortcomings of Edward Said’s theories and criticizes the tendency to view East and West as two well-defined regions.
EAST-WEST DICHOTOMY: A STUDY OF ORHAN PAMUK'S NOVELSILENT HOUSE
Geographically and linguistically, Turkey has been at the core of the debate surrounding the conflict between East and the West and subsequently between the West and the Islamic world. Orhan Pamuk characterises Turkey as a "JanusNation" which within itself accommodated generational contradictions: between East and West, secularism and religion, and modernism and tradition. Pamuk does not choose one over the other but argues that the country must incorporate all of these contradictions.Orhan Pamuk's literary works are frequently characterised by the East-West conflicts leading to a sort of confusion or loss of personal identity. In the press announcement made on Orhan Pamuk's receipt of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006, the Swedish Academy lauded Pamuk as a novelist "who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures" (The Nobel Prize in Literature 2006). The clash between two dissimilar cultures East and West, and the phenomena of history and modernity and love and hate make the kernel of Pamuk's literary works.The article attempts to illustrate that the current world has experienced the transition from one stage to another; nonetheless, the dichotomy between the East and the West is still pervasive in the modern world. The East-West dichotomy has multiple implications in different disciplines, including sociology, geography, history, theology, and literary studies. Regardless of the differences in its practices, it continues to symbolise the historical separation or polarization between the East and the West, which still exists in the contemporary world. In this context, Orhan Pamuk have been chosen to investigate the scope and depth of the conflict between two cultures and ideologies.
The Web of Clashing Cultural Values: Turkey and the West in Orhan Pamuk's Snow
2020
Within the framework of Orhan Pamuk's fiction the shortcomings, failures and idealism of various projects of modernization become prominent and he questions the grand narrative of Eurocentric notions of progress and development. He repeatedly returns to the concerns of the past heritage rather than a continual linear drive towards newness and such a technique enables him to project the tension between pro-Western modernity and tradition in the context of Islamic culture. Turkey's first Nobel laureate, Ferit Orhan Pamuk's first utmost political novel is Snow. The protagonist's name is Ka, who is strongly rooted in Western secularism and after arriving in Kars, a peripheral city in turkey, he started to realize that his identity is divided. Through different spatial images the author invokes a very ambiguous urban space which is divided between two extreme groups. The question, if the women of Kars are allowed to wear headscarf or not, raise new notions of space, polit...
Routledge Handbook on Turkish Literature
Routledge Publication, 2023
This Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of Turkish literature within both a local and global context. Across eight thematic sections a collection of subject experts use close readings of literature materials to provide a critical survey of the main issues and topics within the literature. The chapters provide analysis on a wide range of genres and text types, including novels, poetry, religious texts, and drama, with works studied ranging from the fourteenth century right up to the present day. Using such a historic scope allows the volume to be read across cultures and time, while simultaneously contextualizing and investigating how modern Turkish literature interacts with world literature, and finds its place within it. Collectively, the authors challenge the national literary historiography by replacing the Ottoman Turkish literature in the Anatolian civilizations with its plurality of cultures. They also seek to overcome the institutional and theoretical shortcomings within current study of such works, suggesting new approaches and methods for the study of Turkish literature. The Routledge Handbook on Turkish Literature marks a new departure in the reading and studying of Turkish literature. It will be a vital resource for those studying literature, Middle East studies, Turkish and Ottoman history, social sciences, and political science. Didem Havlioğlu is a literary historian working on women and gender in the Ottoman intellectual culture. She has published several articles both in Turkish and English. Her book Mihrî Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Early Modern Ottoman Intellectual History (2017) introduces Mihrî Hatun (ca. 1460-1515), the first woman writer in Ottoman history whose work survived in manuscript copies, and contextualizes her work in the early modern intellectual culture. She is currently an associate professor of the practice, teaching in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. Zeynep Uysal is an associate professor of modern Turkish literature at Boğaziçi University. As a visiting scholar, she taught modern Turkish literature and gave public lectures in the Oriental Institute at the University of Oxford between 2001 and 2003. She published a book titled Olağanüstü Masaldan Çağdaş Anlatıya: Muhayyelât-ı Aziz Efendi [From Marvelous Tales to Modern Narratives: Aziz Efendi's Imaginations] in 2006. She edited a book, titled Edebiyatın Omzundaki Melek: Edebiyatın Tarihle İlişkisi Üzerine Yazılar, about the relationship between history and literature in 2011. Her recent book, Metruk Ev, on the leading modern Turkish writer Halit Ziya Uşaklıgil, was published in 2014. She has also written extensively on various issues in modern Turkish literature, including the relationship between literature and space, literature and history, and literature and nationalism in leading academic journals.