Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature

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.