Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature

Description

When Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, he was honored for using his craft as a novelist to bridge a troubling gap between the Judeo-Christian West and the Islamic East. Gloria Fisk contests this pervasive way of reading Pamuk to look skeptically at the ways Western literary cultures expand their reach around the world. Taking the Turkish novelist as a case study in that expansion, Fisk reads his post-9/11 novels in the context of their international reception to weigh the costs and benefits of valuing literature as a source of cross-cultural understanding. The result is a case study in the uneven processes of translation, circulation, and judgment that carry a writer across the eastern edge of Europe to his readers all over the globe. Table of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Slippery Words: Orhan Pamuk, Good, and World Literature 1. A Novel Can Teach You About Other People 2. A Novel Can Teach You About Other People’s History 3. Orhan Pamuk as Political Gadfly: “The Armenian Issue” 4. Orhan Pamuk as Exile: Pamuk and Auerbach in Istanbul 5. Orhan Pamuk Wins the Nobel Prize: The Cases of Orhan Pamuk and Mo Yan 6. World Literature as an Artifact of the University in the United States: The Part About the Critics Coda: Now, What? Notes Bibliography Index