The City of Collective Melancholy: Revisiting Pamuk’s Istanbul
Deriu, D. 2020. The City of Collective Melancholy: Revisiting Pamuk’s Istanbul. Architecture and Culture. 8 (1), pp. 69-93. https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2020.1721157
Deriu, D. 2020. The City of Collective Melancholy: Revisiting Pamuk’s Istanbul. Architecture and Culture. 8 (1), pp. 69-93. https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2020.1721157
Title | The City of Collective Melancholy: Revisiting Pamuk’s Istanbul |
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Type | Journal article |
Authors | Deriu, D. |
Abstract | This essay looks back upon Orhan Pamuk’s non-fiction book, Istanbul: Memories of a City (2003), and unpacks its multi-layered representation of the city as landscape. It is here that Pamuk pursues most overtly “the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city” which won him the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature. Weaving personal memoir and historical essay into a unique narrative tapestry, Pamuk’s book explores a series of tensions that define the city’s image and identity; insider/outsider and East/West polarities, in particular, are tirelessly deconstructed. The essay examines Pamuk’s poetics and politics of memory in relation to works by other authors, notably Walter Benjamin. In conclusion, the new edition of Istanbul (2015) is discussed against the background of the social and spatial changes that have beset Turkey’s cultural capital in the interim. |
Keywords | Walter Benjamin; city; Istanbul; landscape; melancholy; memory; nostalgia; Orhan Pamuk |
Journal | Architecture and Culture |
Journal citation | 8 (1), pp. 69-93 |
ISSN | 2050-7836 |
Year | 2020 |
Publisher | Taylor & Francis |
Accepted author manuscript | File Access Level Open (open metadata and files) |
Digital Object Identifier (DOI) | https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2020.1721157 |
Web address (URL) | https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20507828.2020.1721157 |
Publication dates | |
Published online | 13 May 2020 |
Published in print | Dec 2020 |