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Orhan Pamuk’s Nights of Plague: Fairytale, History, Allegory
$265
In this seminar you will explore Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk’s Nights of Plague (2022), an epic narrative which depicts the outbreak of the bubonic plague in the late Ottoman era. The stage is the fictional island Mingheria in the Levant, and the year is 1901. In this novel, the author extends the themes he has examined in his oeuvre towards new trajectories of inquiry. The trope of East-West, or tradition versus modernity, centers now around the notion of Muslim fatalism, coined by Western Orientalist discourse. Pamuk questions racial theories around the turn of the century that attributed the origins of contagious diseases to the East, or the “foreign.” Nights of Plague enacts a scientific-medical discourse, a political coup, a murder, as well as romance, while a rich cast of characters holds the story in suspense. The epidemic becomes the catalyst of transitioning to a new form of community. Nights of Plague offers a reflection on vanishing cosmopolitan identities and the emergence of nationhood. Pamuk’s signature style manifests itself through multiple mediations, leading to an open-ended representation of history.
Texts:
Orhan Pamuk, Nights of Plague (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group)
Access Program
We want our writing classes and seminars to be accessible to everyone, regardless of income and background. We understand that our tuition structure can present obstacles for some people. Our Access Program offers writing class and seminar tuitions at a reduced rate. Most seminars have at least one access spot available.
Please apply here for access rate tuition. Contact Susan Moore at susan@literary-arts.org if you have questions.
Liaison position
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Delve Cancellation Policy
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Ülker Gökberk
Ülker Gökberk is Professor Emerita of German and Humanities at Reed College. She earned her Ph.D. in Germanics at the University of Washington (1986) and her M.A. and B.A. degrees in Philosophy at the University of Istanbul. She has been at Reed since 1986. Her forthcoming book is titled Excavating Memory: Bilge Karasu’s Istanbul and Walter Benjamin’s Berlin.
