Dissertation

The Bosphorus Incarnate: Postmodern Fiction and Identity Representation in the Novels of Orhan Pamuk and a Comparison with Hungarian Literature

Yılmaz, Barış

2021

Overview

As one of the world’s leading contemporary writers, Orhan Pamuk has a major influence on world literature owing to his work’s share of the global book market, as well as the scholarly attention he draws. It would not be an overstatement to claim that Pamuk is the most well-known and widely-read Turkish author of our century–maybe of all time, given that his books have been translated into nearly 60 languages and are always included in best-selling novel lists. In the meantime, academics around the globe have also paid attention to Pamuk’s novels because of their varied fine qualities.First and foremost, Orhan Pamuk’s fictional and non-fictional writings articulate the peculiar experience of living in a borderland between East and West, in Istanbul, where the Bosphorus separates the Asian continent from Europe, while the remnants of an Islamic civilization and aspiring Western lifestyle coexist to some degree. Pamuk’s novels thus pose a number of important questions about the cultural dichotomy and paradigm shift in Turkey on the periphery of Europe and Asia. These questions surrounding the interactions of opposite poles in the country are not only limited to political or sociological grounds, but also frame and fashion the literary interplay between the two sides of the cultural divide in Turkey and their cultural positioning against Europe. Like the bridge over the Bosphorus, which links not only the two continents but also the world-views, Pamuk combines the narrative techniques of postmodern fiction fostered in the West with themes and styles from Turkish and Eastern literary traditions. In this regard, he can be called The Bosphorus Incarnate, for he writes and acts as the strait itself, the singularity of which stems from this peculiar experience of lying between two vying civilizations and not belonging entirely to either of them. That is why his works are often seen as part of both world literature and Turkish literature, which raises new concerns about which literary canon Pamuk should be included in. This may be another explanation for the scholarly curiosity in Pamuk’s writing.Accordingly, there is a significant corpus about Orhan Pamuk and his novels, which have been written in Turkish, English and certainly in other languages from various perspectives. It would be unattainable to list all the MA and PhD theses, essays, monographs, biographies, etc. written about Pamuk in Turkish. If I only mention the titles of some of the English ones, I should start with Erdağ Göknar’s comprehensive interpretation, Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novelpublished in 2013. This work, which is claimed to be the “first critical study of all Pamuk’s novels” by its author, who was a former English translator of Pamuk, not only deals with the works of Pamuk, but also correspondingly interprets some other works from prose to poetry that have an influential presence in Turkish literature. Göknar’s critical study is clearly useful, given that most of the criticisms of Pamuk’s writing do not take into account the role of the Turkish socio-political and literary background in his work, nor do they reflect his association with modern Turkish or classical Turkish/Islamic literature. Nevertheless, the allinclusive methodology of Göknar makes his research a bit confusing and dispersed.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Audiences / Biographies / East European Studies / Historical fiction / Historiography / Language / Literary devices / Middle Eastern literature / Nation states / Novels / Political science / Politics / Postmodernism / Religion / Snow / Sufism / Traditions / Translation studies / Translations / Transnationalism / Writers / Writing
• ISBN: 9798381068429