Writing as if in the Center: World Literature and Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City (original) (raw)

East-West Dichotomy in Orhan Pamuk’s The White Castle

The Creative Launcher, 2021

Orhan Pamuk’s The White Castle is a historical novel that is set during the Ottoman reign. The novel presents the metaphysical opposition of East and West, self and the other, intuition and reason, mysticism, science and global and local, and the recurring issues of conflict of civilization, identity crisis, and cultural variations. Orhan Pamuk as a postmodern writer tries to bridge the gap between the East and the West through his writings. Although Turkey is at the backdrop in most of his novels, the treatment of themes is universal. The paper proposes the theory of Orientalism by Edward Said, which represents the encounter and treatment of the "Orient." The concept of identity expressed by Pamuk in his wide range of novels also can be related to the “Orient” and “Occident.” The culture of the East has always been portrayed as the binary opposite of Europe in history and fiction. The loss of identity of the East reflected in the works of Pamuk is an outcome of the clash ...

Blurring the Boundaries: The East-West Predicament in Pamuk’s a Strangeness in My Mind

International Journal of Humanity Studies (IJHS), 2023

This research focuses on Orhan Pamuk's A Strangeness in My Mind. Since the Ottoman Empire, modernity that is represented by the West has become a threat and seduction. Due to the issue, this research is conducted to highlight the transformation of İstanbul, analyse Turkey's political agenda which enormously affects İstanbul and its citizens' identity formation process, and investigate the result of the East-West predicament towards the main characters. This research is a descriptive qualitative method which employs Homi Bhabha's discourse on Postcolonialism to uncover the predicament of the oscillation. The findings unveil 1) how İstanbul's cosmopolitanism and uniqueness that have disappeared bring such a grieve towards the life of the citizens; 2) the ambivalence that is caused by both Atatürk and Erdoğan's political agendas; and 3) the east-west oscillation which has led to melancholy and confusion. In addition, Mevlut's strangeness mind is a bridge that tries to connect his friends and relatives who have different political views. Importantly, he also tries to blur the boundaries and promote tolerance towards various groups, religions, cultures, and traditions.

East and West: A Failure of Imagination

Comenius Journal, 2017

The dominant discourse in both scholarly analysis and public narratives separate Eastern and Western Europe, but this separation comes at a hermeneutic cost. This essay's approach critiques the assumption that political theory is the instrumental result of a particular historical-political circumstance that cannot be reproduced and has mostly the value of intellectual history. This dominant perspective has favored historical process over conceptual discussion, and it has entrenched political thought in a teleological account of nationalism. The article explores the construction and implication of the East-West duality, especially in relation to the way in which we receive and interpret Eastern European political thought. I bring together an investigation of the conceptual purchase of Eastern Europe as a category and the possibility of rethinking Eastern European political thought in that context. I briefly exemplify the underlying critique by looking at the work of Václav Havel. KEY WORDS East and West-Political Theory-Eastern Europe-Václav Havel-Orientalism

Orhan Pamuk's "Istanbul: Memories and the City": A Stratigraphic and Polysensorial Autobiography

Space has always been an important factor in human cultural production. Since ancient times, the idea of "space" and "place" has played a crucial role in literature, as well. If one thinks of some of the first literary works (The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Holy Bible, The Iliad and The Odyssey, Rāmāyaṇa or Mahābhārata), one cannot ignore the importance of the routes that the characters follow, the interaction between heroes and the environment (weather, flora and fauna). Thus, "space" can hardly be separated from the environment in the study of literary texts. Time and history used to be the main preoccupation of literary critics until the spatial turn occurred after the World War II, so, space became the main target of scholars and critics, as Robert T. Tally Jr. noticed in the Preface of Bertrand Westphal's book, Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces: "The nineteenth century had been dominated by a discourse of time, history, and a teleological development (following in the Hegelian tradition) and by a modernist aesthetic that enshrined the temporal, especially with respect to individual psychology (à la Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time). But after the Second World War, space began to reassert itself in critical theory, rivaling if not overtaking time" (Westphal 2011: ix). Geocriticism, an approach coined and developed in the second half of the last century, aims, as Bertrand Westphal states in the Foreword to Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies: "[…] to explore some of the interstices that until recent times were blank spaces for literary studies. Geocriticism is clearly affiliated with those theories that unleash spatial perception and representation in a nomadic perspective, which have made for a very stimulating background" (Tally Jr. 2011: xiii). An interdisciplinary method, geocriticism represents a nexus between literary studies, geography, environmental studies, cultural studies, religious studies,

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.

Representation of the East in Western Literature

Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences , 2012

Representation in discourse is a constructed practice; that is, it is not neutral. Events and ideas are not transmitted neutrally as they were, because they have to pass through a medium with its own ideological filters. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context. Edward Said’s book Orientalism (1976) focuses on how the East is represented by the West. He believes that during the process of representation, the Orient is also remade. He mentions a number of writers who he believes depict distorted images of the East in order to satiate their colonizing ends among whom is Kingslake and his travel narrative Eothen (1844). Twenty seven pages from this travelogue have been taken as the data of this research. The purpose was to reveal how the writer has tried to create a biased image of the Orient. The method applied was van Dijk’s ideological square which is used to reveal forms of positive self and negative other. Upon extracting these biased images, the rhetorical techniques used to create them were identified. Interestingly the findings suggest that the travelogue was saturated with creations of binary oppositions revealing a biased and inaccurate description of the East.

The East-West Dichotomy: From Orientalism to Postcoloniality

IOSR Journals , 2019

The main purpose of this study is to define and explain the concept of 'Orientalism' developed and practised by Edward Said, a pioneer postcolonial theorist. According to him, the concept of Orientalism refers to the western views about the Orient or the East. However, it has raised a number of debates among the scholars on defining his concept. It can be defined in three ways as: an academic field of study, an epistemological and ontological way of looking at the world and a western hegemony. It has also been the focus of a number of controversies and polemics such as crisis on Orientalism, its connection with western theories and the rise of Occidentalism. Many scholars agree with the fact that the publication of the book Orientalism is a beginning of postcolonial discourse in history, philosophy, anthropology, arts and literature. Similarly, it provides an approach to the study of non-western texts. Interestingly because both Orientalism and NonWestern Studies deconstruct the Western Studies, both are therefore sometimes referred to as 'poststructuralist' approaches.

Edward Said and Recent Orientalist Critiques

Arab Studies Quarterly

Abstract: There have been many attempts in recent years to discredit Edward Said's tbesis of tbe "affiliation of knov>/ledge with power" (1997: xlix) by those who argue that Orientalist scholarship represents genuine and accurate knowledge of the Arab/Islamic world. Said's detractors claim that much of Orientalist scholarship has been "sympathetic" to the Orient and is free from any power motive. However, this article will attempt to show how all of these arguments fall apart when put to the test of reality, past and present, in literature. Orientalist scholarship and politics. After all the arguments of Bernard Lewis, Ibn Warraq and think tank and area experts, it is Said's voice of humanism that drowns out all of his dissenters' voices in this Orientalist war of words, which as Said believed, is "richly symptomatic of precisely what is denied" (1985: 91).