Erdag Goknar: "Orhan Pamuk Reimagines the Ottoman Legacy"
Date
Tue May 18th 2010, 5:00pm
Event Sponsor
Co-sponsored by the Mediterranean Studies Forum and Stanford Humanities Center.
Location
Encina West 208
Erdag Goknar (Assistant Professor of Turkish Studies, Duke University) "Orhan Pamuk Reimagines the Ottoman Legacy" What does the legacy of the Ottoman Empire have to do with the contemporary Turkish novel? Pamuk’s fiction problematizes received understandings of the Ottoman past in a sustained challenge to Republican historiography. His work reimagines the Ottoman legacy in relation to Republican discourses through two novels in particular, The White Castle (1985) and My Name is Red (1998). Pamuk’s “premodern” retrospection in these historical novels allows him to reorient Turkish literary modernity and qualify the secularization thesis that dominates literary histories.