activist pleading, “Save Aleppo. Save humanity.” The aerial footage of the city is apocalyptic, but it is the images of individuals grasping for hope as they face death that has truly captured and horrified the masses. We have seen this before: the figures leaping from the World Trade Center, the story of Anne Frank and her family, the tear-soaked faces in countless images of countless massacres. It is the human loss that is striking, the fact that real, ordinary people were part of some massive, historical event. This raises questions, though. How do we reconcile the individual with mass atrocity? How can we make the private individual fit within the cold, public expanse of history? Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Orhan Pamuk’s Snow consider the relationship between individual identity and collective, historical tragedy,…
In the recently published first volume of memoirs, Istanbul: Memories and the City, Orhan Pamuk describes how a 1950’s child hood among Europe -yearning cosmopolitans in the crumbling ruins of the Ottoman Empire helped to shape him as a writer. The key, he said, is to understand the concept of huzun. This turkish word describes a kind of melancholy, he says, not so much a personal state as one shared by an entire society, a mood of resigned despair for the great past - a murky, black white…
Orhan Pamuk and Cosmopolitanism: An Analysis of The Silent House, The White Castle and Snow Nasir Butt Research Scholar Deptt of English Central University of Jammu Abstract: In today’s world, when no nation or culture can remain isolated and pure, it is imperative to expand the concentric circles of belonging to the global level. Cosmopolitanism, as Nussbaum believes means to expand one’s allegiance from local, ethnic and expand it from national through international. This is the possible way…
against the conventional codes of the society but also against his own dilemmas and doubts. Eminent English novelist David Mitchell (b.1969) calls the book “an additive childhood memoir, a museum-in-prose of a city with West in its head but East in its soul, and a study of the alchemy between place and self”. Pamuk wrote this memoir at the age of fifty two, compiling all those spots of time, memories, and feelings which he believes shaped his persona. Pamuk, as he is known for being an…
Pamuk explores these concepts through the character of Gulip, and his attempt at finding his estranged wife, Ruya. In his search for his wife, Gulip decides to morphm into Celal. Celal was Ruya’s brother and their relationship was described as two people that “...stayed very close. You’d never know he was only her half brother. She loved him like a real brother and he loved her like a sister!” However, Gulip was adamant that his wife had decided to disappear with Celal. In his mission to track…
Rationale Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Museum of Innocence (2008) possesses the multimedial quality that is fascinating and inviting. It serves as both a literary work and an artistic product that derived from the act of collecting. Four years after the publication of the novel, Pamuk founded the museum in Istanbul that serves as the physical counterpart of the novel. At the same year, he also published a catalog The Innocence of Objects (2012) explaining the composition of each cabinet and the…
us down / Before the words of goodbye” implying of swiftness of time as well as of the uncomfortable change. The narrator says “And storms will arrive and harvest us down” reaffirming this uncomfortable feeling of summer ending. The lyrics imply that autumn holds a certain melancholy, a sentiment of longing, caused by the change felt by the “children of the setting sun”. As seen in the five examples, longing and nostalgia are seen from the narrator’s viewpoint. However, the narrator is not the…
Vision and Sound: Polyphony in Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red and Vaikom Muhammed Basheer’s Walls The term polyphony, meaning multiple voices, has its origin in Western music. Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian thinker has adopted the term polyphony to explain the nature of Dostoevsky’s novels. In his Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics Bakhtin says that Dostoevsky makes his characters free from his control and allows them to have their own voices. In the same work, Bakhtin later says that…
“Deadwood”, “Road to Perdition”, “The Hours” are all examples of works that students from the University of Iowa participated in (thegazette.com). This is proof that our lives have benefited from the power of these writings. We find enjoyment and delight in the creativity of these works. The Universities reach seems to have no boundaries. People around the world have benefited from the school 's workshop. The University of Iowa News Services reports that, "More than 1,200 emerging and…