Synopses & Reviews
Global Perspectives on Orhan Pamuk is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that explores Pamuk's multifaceted approach to ordinary Turkish life. The contributors of this volume come from an array of international perspectives that place the reading of Pamuk into dynamic arenas of new interpretation and reflection. The themes of existentialism and politics are examined in illuminating essays through connections to nationalism, religion/secularity, traditional/modern, exile/home, and comparative readings of writers as Mohsin Hamid, Naguib Mahfouz, Italo Svevo, and Amitav Ghosh. This is an indispensable collection for understanding Pamuk, global literature, and crucial issues in today's world.
Synopsis
Explores existential and political themes in Orhan Pamuk's work and investigates the apparent contradictions in an arena where Islam and democracy are often seen as opposing and irreconcilable terms. Existential themes delve into literary nuances in Pamuk that discuss love, happiness, suffering, memory and death.
About the Author
Mehnaz M. Afridi, PhD, University of South Africa, is an assistant professor of Religious Studies, and director of The Holocaust, Genocide, and Interfaith Education Center at Manhattan College. She is currently writing a book entitled
Shoah through Muslim Eyes and has published in
Sacred Tropes: Tanakh, New Testament, and the Qur'an as Literature and Culture (Routledge), and in
Not Your Father's Antisemitism: Hatred of the Jews in the Twenty-First Century (Paragon House).
David M. Buyze, Ph.D,. University of Toronto, teaches at the University of Vermont as online faculty. He has most recently
published: "Carmen Boullosa's Duerme, and the Inventing of Difference in Race and Religion," Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion, April 2011, and "Identity, Interiority, and Snow," Spiritual Identities: Literature and the Post-Secular Imagination, 2010. He was until recently a fellow at the Schusterman Institute for Israel Studies at Brandeis University in summer 2011, and was previously an NEH Summer Institute fellow in Venice, Italy, in 2008.
Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsForeword Pamuk and No End; S.L.Gilman Introduction; M.M.Afridi & D.M.Buyze PART I: PAMUK BETWEEN WORLDS Modern Postcolonial Intersections: Hamid, Mahfouz, and Pamuk; M.M.AfridiTensions in the Nation: Pamuk and Svevo; D.M.BuyzePART II: PAMUK'S TEXTUAL DIVERSITY Mirroring Istanbul; H.Gurses Problematizing East-West Essentialisms: Discourse, Authorhood, and Identity Crisis in Orhan Pamuk's Beyaz Kale (The White Castle); M.PittmanFraming My Name Is Red: Reading a Masterpiece; E.Almas On the Road or between the Pages: Seeking Life's Answers; F.HassencahlPART III: PAMUK'S SNOW The Imagined Exile: Orhan Pamuk in His Novel Snow; H.Yilmaz Silence, Secularism, and Fundamentalism in Snow; E.SantessoThe Spell of the West in Orhan Pamuk's Snow and Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land; T.CartelliPART IV: PAMUK and TRANSLATION/UNTRANSLATION Orhan Pamuk's Kara Kitap [The Black Book]: a Double Life in English; S.TürkkanOcculted Texts: Pamuk's Untranslated Novels; E.Göknar Contributor Biographies