ORHAN PAMUK’UN VEBA GECELERİ’NDE MODERNLİĞİN FELSEFİ SÖYLEMİ: BÜYÜSÜ BOZULAN BİR DÜNYADA ÖZNELLİK, İLETİŞİM VE DOĞU-BATI SORUNU
Articles > Article · 2022
Authors: Kurtuluş CENGİZ, Gürel, Özgür Emrah
Dokuz Eylül Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Dergisi, International, 2022
Summary
This article critically aims to analyze Orhan Pamuk’s latest novel, Nights of Plague (2021) by interpreting it within the philosophical discourse of modernity. In almost none of Pamuk’s novels published so far, a synthesis to overcome the East-West tension or an ontological advocacy has been witnessed. While emphasizing the East- West dialectic in each of his novels such as The White Castle, The Black Book, My Name is Red, Snow or The Red-Haired Woman, Pamuk carefully stays away from a holistic narrative that transcends both ontologies or a particular defense of an ontological structure. On the contrary, this study aims to point out that that Nights of Plague can be read as a break in Pamuk’s literary oeuvre. Thus the narrative in Nights of Plague, built on the philosophical discourse of modernity enables Pamuk to present the Western rationalism as a normative alternative against the traditional and dogmatic discourses of the East particularly by underlying the concepts of freedom, citizenship, constitutional democracy, the aesthetic creativity, republicanism and the primacy of the science. This study specifically aims to suggest a philosophical analysis of this peculiar narrative in Nights of Plague. Therefore, this article first and foremost begins by outlining the paradigms established by Hegel’s and Weber’s philosophical and sociological investigations in their works respectively, and then will closely follow the famous Habermas-Foucault correspondences, recognized as one of the most comprehensive analyzes of modernity in the 20th century. Secondly our work aims to interpret Pamuk’s Nights of Plague through a critical reading process, which simultaneously centers on the hermeneutical and phenomenological axes with the help of conceptual framework mentioned above.