Orhan Pamuk’s city and the Turkish republic An engagement with the modern nation state

In this dissertation I examine selected works of Turkish author Orhan Pamuk with a focus on the representation of the city of Istanbul and the mediating role it plays between the subject of Pamuk’s narrative and the state. I identify in the narrative the means with which the city allows the narrative subject to participate in the modern nation state but with alternative modes of subjective agency, thus enabling the subject to dismantle the identity which is imposed by the state. This analysis also demonstrates the ways in which Pamuk places the social processes of modernisation and westernisation under the scrutinising gaze of the modern citizen. Self-reflexivity is achieved in his writings by re-imagining and re-presenting specific spaces in the city as spaces of dissent, self-effacement, and the re-negotiating of identities that have been compromised by the nation state. By looking at the case study of Istanbul and the Turkish Republic through the lens provided by Pamuk, themes such as the internalised orientalism of the intellectual and political elite, the over-writing of local histories and the construction of new nationalist identities, the hybridised yet insoluble persistence of alternative epistemological traditions, and the city as a space of imaginary re-visioning separate from the nation state are brought into focus. By viewing the nation state through the perspective Pamuk provides, this study identifies the possibilities of an epistemological shift from the European Enlightenment model to more local epistemes.