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Orhan Pamuk’s Nights of Plague: Fairy Tale, History, Allegory
$245
In this seminar we will explore Orhan Pamuk’s new novel, Nights of Plague, an epic narrative which depicts the outbreak of the bubonic plague in the late Ottoman era during the reign of the despotic Sultan Abdülhamid II. The stage of the epidemic is the fictional island Minger in the Levant, and the year is 1901. Presented as an historical novel, Nights of Plague’s diseased universe resonates with our current world, hit by the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet, the Nobel laureate author has stressed that he has been working on the novel in the last four years and has played with the idea of writing a “plague novel” over decades.
While Pamuk counts Defoe, Manzoni, and Camus among his predecessors in the genre, Nights of Plague with its myriad of themes reveals a multifaceted experiment, unique to the author. Pamuk extends here the themes he has examined in his oeuvre toward new trajectories of inquiry. The tropes of East-West, or tradition versus modernity, center now around the notion of Muslim fatalism, as it became prevalent in the Western Orientalist discourse. The novel enacts a scientific-medical discourse, a political coup, a murder, while a rich cast of nationalist and cosmopolitan characters, including an Ottoman princess, hold the story in suspense.
Published in the original in 2021, the English translation of Nights of Plague is scheduled to be published in early October 2022.
Text:
Nights of Plague by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Ekin Oklap. Penguin-Randomhouse. October 4, 2022. Hardcover: ISBN 9780525656890. The book can be preordered. It will be also available in Ebook and Audiobook formats.
Access Program
We want our writing classes and Delves 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 Delve tuitions at a reduced rate. The access program for writing classes covers 60% of the class tuition. Most writing classes 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.
