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.
About the Author
Gloria Fisk is an associate professor at Queens College, CUNY. Her work has been published in New Literary History, n+1, and The American Reader.
Reviews
Gloria Fisk has written an important and challenging book. Using the work and career of Orhan Pamuk, she has set out to understand the complex and not always benign forces that go into the making of a worldwide literary superstar. Not for or against Pamuk, this book is with him in his attempt to enter the gates of the Western canon without at the same time losing his soul. -- Keith Gessen, cofounding editor of n + 1
Taking Orhan Pamuk as her central case study, Gloria Fisk probes the uses and abuses of world authors in American literary studies, as foreign writers become enlisted for domestic agendas. Her nuanced account will provoke self-reflection and debate among postcolonialists, comparatists, and world literary scholars alike. -- David Damrosch, Harvard University
Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature unrelentingly probes what it means to think of the literary as a vehicle of political good, to assume that reading a novel about far-off places promotes empathy, and to valorize select writers as translators of alien worlds, even as their works circulate only in English in the West. Showing what it means to read a writer like Orhan Pamuk as a bridge between East and West, Fisk highlights the risks of transporting a U.S. multicultural logic to the globe, insisting that the Anglo-American academy is complicit in the very hegemony it seeks to critique. -- Yogita Goyal, University of California, Los Angeles
In this forcefully argued book, Gloria Fisk defends Orhan Pamuk-and other writers of world literature-from nationalists who brand them as traitors and academics who cling to reading in the original. It is a book that tackles the question of literature in our time. -- Martin Puchner, Harvard University
A provocative and necessary contribution to the field of contemporary world literature. -- Audrey J. Golden * College Literature *
One of Fisk's ancillary achievements lies in modeling a single-author monograph that is expansive rather than parochial, progressive and not fuddy-duddy ... If, by the end of Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature, literature's good has not been rebuilt exactly, Fisk does suggest the path towards a more modest literary criticism-a future that looks bright so long as we have scholars amongst us like Fisk who write with not only intellectual honesty but moral clarity. -- Jesse Bordwin * Studies in the Novel *
Moving deftly from text to context, from the literary to the extra-literary, from the internal dynamics of the work of art to the institutions the work inhabits, Fisk displays a rare methodological versatility and performs these analyses with a sophistication that is rarer still. The strength of Fisk's argument rests on her reorientation of the debate over world literature, reading it as a product of its institutional location, rather than the terms it sets for itself. -- Janice Ho * Novel: A Forum on Fiction *
Across this work Gloria Fisk examines the Orhan Pamuk case and delivers a compelling account of the state of non-Western authors and the good they are expected to do in the world with their literature.... Her stance provides her a sensitive lens through which to observe the abundant and complicated social and political aspects interwoven in Turkey's fabric. -- Busra Copuroglu * C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings *
Gloria Fisk's Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature is a timely book, not only because it contributes to the continuing debate on world literature that has occupied literary academic circles since the 1990s but also because it sets out to uncover the immense impact of neoliberalism on academia in the United States. -- Meltem Gurle * Twentieth-Century Literature *
Book Information
ISBN 9780231183260
Author Gloria Fisk
Format Hardback
Page Count 280
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press
About the Author
Gloria Fisk is an associate professor at Queens College, CUNY. Her work has been published in New Literary History, n+1, and The American Reader.
Reviews
Gloria Fisk has written an important and challenging book. Using the work and career of Orhan Pamuk, she has set out to understand the complex and not always benign forces that go into the making of a worldwide literary superstar. Not for or against Pamuk, this book is with him in his attempt to enter the gates of the Western canon without at the same time losing his soul. -- Keith Gessen, cofounding editor of n + 1
Taking Orhan Pamuk as her central case study, Gloria Fisk probes the uses and abuses of world authors in American literary studies, as foreign writers become enlisted for domestic agendas. Her nuanced account will provoke self-reflection and debate among postcolonialists, comparatists, and world literary scholars alike. -- David Damrosch, Harvard University
Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature unrelentingly probes what it means to think of the literary as a vehicle of political good, to assume that reading a novel about far-off places promotes empathy, and to valorize select writers as translators of alien worlds, even as their works circulate only in English in the West. Showing what it means to read a writer like Orhan Pamuk as a bridge between East and West, Fisk highlights the risks of transporting a U.S. multicultural logic to the globe, insisting that the Anglo-American academy is complicit in the very hegemony it seeks to critique. -- Yogita Goyal, University of California, Los Angeles
In this forcefully argued book, Gloria Fisk defends Orhan Pamuk-and other writers of world literature-from nationalists who brand them as traitors and academics who cling to reading in the original. It is a book that tackles the question of literature in our time. -- Martin Puchner, Harvard University
A provocative and necessary contribution to the field of contemporary world literature. -- Audrey J. Golden * College Literature *
One of Fisk's ancillary achievements lies in modeling a single-author monograph that is expansive rather than parochial, progressive and not fuddy-duddy ... If, by the end of Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature, literature's good has not been rebuilt exactly, Fisk does suggest the path towards a more modest literary criticism-a future that looks bright so long as we have scholars amongst us like Fisk who write with not only intellectual honesty but moral clarity. -- Jesse Bordwin * Studies in the Novel *
Moving deftly from text to context, from the literary to the extra-literary, from the internal dynamics of the work of art to the institutions the work inhabits, Fisk displays a rare methodological versatility and performs these analyses with a sophistication that is rarer still. The strength of Fisk's argument rests on her reorientation of the debate over world literature, reading it as a product of its institutional location, rather than the terms it sets for itself. -- Janice Ho * Novel: A Forum on Fiction *
Across this work Gloria Fisk examines the Orhan Pamuk case and delivers a compelling account of the state of non-Western authors and the good they are expected to do in the world with their literature.... Her stance provides her a sensitive lens through which to observe the abundant and complicated social and political aspects interwoven in Turkey's fabric. -- Busra Copuroglu * C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings *
Gloria Fisk's Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature is a timely book, not only because it contributes to the continuing debate on world literature that has occupied literary academic circles since the 1990s but also because it sets out to uncover the immense impact of neoliberalism on academia in the United States. -- Meltem Gurle * Twentieth-Century Literature *
Book Information
ISBN 9780231183260
Author Gloria Fisk
Format Hardback
Page Count 280
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press
