Abstract:

The focus of the article is the construction of the city image in Orhan Pamuk’s memory. The essence of the image of İstanbul in İstanbul Memories and the City appears to be a profound sense of melancholy, which gives way to an equally deep sense of happiness that, Pamuk opines, few other cities could possess. The article then investigates Pamuk’s sources of inspiration in creating İstanbul’s image which is loaded with melancholy. It is obvious that Pamuk’s memories concerning İstanbul have been mainly but not exclusively- shaped by four poets\writers to whom the author sincere expresses his gratitude in the work. The first two are the Turkish authors, Yahya Kemal Beyatlı and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, who themselves had been influenced by the other two, Gerard de Nerval and Theophile Gautier. Gautier’s travel w r i t i n g s , which he later published under the title of Constantinople had a considerable impact on Yahya Kemal Beyatlı and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, both of whom developed a different and indigenous İstanbul image for its inhabitants. What makes this city image different and original is the combination of the beautiful with the bizarre, the miserable and the sordid which brings about a sense of prevailing melancholy rising over the ruins of a collapsed empire. While following the footsteps of his literary predecessors, Pamuk also renders an early autobiography which is interwoven into the cultural, socio-political, and environmental, changes that took place in Istanbul in the twentieth century. The theoretical framework of the article is based on the views of Freud, Kristeva, and Peter Schwenger.

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