scholarly journals East-West Dichotomy in Orhan Pamuk’s The White Castle

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 198-207
Author(s):  
Soumya Samanta

Orhan Pamuk’s The White Castle is a historical novel that is set during the Ottoman reign. The novel presents the metaphysical opposition of East and West, self and the other, intuition and reason, mysticism, science and global and local, and the recurring issues of conflict of civilization, identity crisis, and cultural variations. Orhan Pamuk as a postmodern writer tries to bridge the gap between the East and the West through his writings. Although Turkey is at the backdrop in most of his novels, the treatment of themes is universal. The paper proposes the theory of Orientalism by Edward Said, which represents the encounter and treatment of the "Orient." The concept of identity expressed by Pamuk in his wide range of novels also can be related to the “Orient” and “Occident.” The culture of the East has always been portrayed as the binary opposite of Europe in history and fiction. The loss of identity of the East reflected in the works of Pamuk is an outcome of the clash between East and Europe, further leading to chaotic contexts and dilemmatic protagonists. Individuals unable to choose between the traditional self and the fashionable West mourn the lost identity of a country and their self.

Author(s):  
Robert Louis Stevenson ◽  
Ian Duncan

Your bed shall be the moorcock’s, and your life shall be like the hunted deer’s, and ye shall sleep with your hand upon your weapons.’ Tricked out of his inheritance, shanghaied, shipwrecked off the west coast of Scotland, David Balfour finds himself fleeing for his life in the dangerous company of Jacobite outlaw and suspected assassin Alan Breck Stewart. Their unlikely friendship is put to the test as they dodge government troops across the Scottish Highlands. Set in the aftermath of the 1745 rebellion, Kidnapped transforms the Romantic historical novel into the modern thriller. Its heart-stopping scenes of cross-country pursuit, distilled to a pure intensity in Stevenson’s prose, have become a staple of adventure stories from John Buchan to Alfred Hitchcock and Ian Fleming. Kidnapped remains as exhilarating today as when it was first published in 1886. This new edition is based on the 1895 text, incorporating Stevenson’s last thoughts about the novel before his death. It includes Stevenson’s ‘Note to Kidnapped’, reprinted for the first time since 1922.


Conatus ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 75
Author(s):  
Liliya Leonidovna Sazonova

In the first chapter of the paper we elaborate on the attitude towards the Other in the European Union by discussing two adversative yet simultaneous processes taking place in the EU. The first tendency is a legacy from the centuries-lasting model of European unification against certain important Others. The second one refers to the aspiration of the supra-national European project to encourage in an unprecedented manner the co-existence with the otherness. We argue that this ambivalence results from the fact that the transformation of the attitude towards the otherness takes place with different tempo in the different social spheres.   In the second chapter we develop further the reflection on the EU attitude towards the Other by focusing on the East European Other. We discuss the normative and de facto application of the European values both in the West and in the East part of the continent.In the last chapter we articulate two separate discourses framing the European values. The first one refers to the essentialist approach looking for a metaphysical reasoning of their universality by developing the common culture, history and spirit rhetoric. The second reading of the European values presents them in a more postmodern and debatable way and offers a mechanism for reconciling the heterogenic East-West European society.


Author(s):  
Kaya Semih

The article analyses the chronotope of the novel by Orhan Pamuk Silent House through the prism of identity problem. The purpose of the article is to establish a connection of this problem to the peculiarities of the interpretation of the chronotope (which is a result of analysis of the opposites capital-country and East-West. The urban issue of the Silent House grounds on the eschatological paradigm and the cyclic concept of the world, the concept of eternal return; this attests a postmodernist understanding of the categories of time and space. Hence, the composition of the novel is a peculiar spatial and temporal mosaic and narrative polyphony. In the temporal space of the Silent House the spatial (home and provincial town) and temporal (past and present) images, motive of travel (real and metaphysical in the form of memories), of the travelers acquire the semantics of existential metamorphosis that lead to moral and spiritual initiation. And the closed space of the novel — the house of Mrs. Fatma and the provincial Turkish town — appears as a special topos-gerontope, the main principle of which is a freezing of the time. In this way Pamuk realizes typical for his works problems of relations between the West and the East and self-identification.


2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-93
Author(s):  
Ahmed Saad Aziz

This study is aimed at finding a narrative of Muslim self-aftermath of 9/11 in the West when it was swept with hatred against Muslims leading to the rise of Islamophobia which is herself experienced by the novelist, Monica Ali. Penning from her own experience, the novel, Brick Lane (2003) can be considered as real experience of many people who were held responsible for crime committed. This study employs descriptive qualitative method in dealing with the rise of islamophobia in the West after the incident of 9/11. This is the textual analysis of the experiences of diasporic Muslim couple from Bangladesh living in London and being the witness of the rise of xenophobia in the form of islamophobia aftermath of 9/11. This evaluation and interpretation are importance in the contemporary scenario as there is a continuous rise of such incidents in Europe and America in different ways. The outcome of these incidents is that it is mostly the innocent Muslims who are being attacked for a crime committed by others.The result shows the bitter experience of simple Bangladeshi Muslims immigrant who struggled for identity crisis in a multicultural highly educated world. It also reflects the personal experiences of writer herself as she being a Bangladeshi is living in West. The result was evaluated by examining Bangladeshi immigrant characters and their various circumstances and situations in the novel. Moreover, the point is that people of South Asian countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan prefer to live and work in West for better standard of living, education and job prospects.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 191
Author(s):  
Hendra Apriyono

This research is motivated by the imbalance of relations between East and West in Arabic travel literature. The inequality is caused by the representation of the superior (West) and the inferior (East) which is constantly being produced. The novel Uṣfur min al-Syarq by Taufiq al-Hakim as one of Arabic travel literature is considered to offer a different view from other Arabic travel literature by proposing the value of equality between East and West. This research is expected to be able to resolve the problem of inequality in relations between East and West as represented in Arabic travel literature. This research uses another representation strategy from Carl Thompson's travel literary concept which consists of colonial, neo-colonial, and post-colonial strategies. The results of this study found that the representations of the others made by al-Hakim which were dominated by the use of colonial and post-colonial strategies showed that the author occupied two opposing positions. On the one hand, al-Hakim is still trapped in colonial discourse and on the other hand, al-Hakim is not entirely successful in bringing the post-colonial travel agenda to escape from Western hegemony. The equality proposed by al-Hakim regarding the East is inseparable from Western assistance. To realize the equality of the East and the West, al-Hakim used the superiority of the West to face the West in order to defend the East.


Author(s):  
Serkan Biçer

Edward Said undoubtedly didn't analyze the concept of orientalism through an Ottoman or Turkish perspective in the context of the relationship with the West. However, although orientalism isn't directly connected to Turkey, it indirectly concerns the country as the image of Turkey and East is the same in many articles, literary works, political texts, and orientalist pictures. The purpose of this study is to understand and analyze the orientalist viewpoint about the Turkish identity on “9GAG” internet site, one of the most known humour sites created after 2000 with the participatory culture. In this study, the two-level interpretation system of Roland Barthes, involving the systematic connotation and denotation and myth, is used. The images of Turks in caps are presented with signifiers such as Turban, Islamic tabard, beard, prayer beads, coif, and shalwar. Signified, on the other hand, is usually the element of East, religion/Islam, tradition, underdevelopment, and violence. The specifically designed Turkish image is used as a kind of actor that creates a sense of threat.


1988 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 263-274
Author(s):  
Bill Overton

Christopher Hampton's play Les Liaisons Dangereuses, based on the novel by Laclos, was first produced at The Other Place at Stratford-upon-Avon in September 1985. It was immediately acclaimed, and after its transfer early in 1986 to The Pit at the Royal Shakespeare Company's London centre, the Barbican, both play and performers won several awards, including four for Best Play. In October 1986, with only a few changes of performer, the production further transferred to the Ambassadors Theatre in the West End. At the time of writing the Ambassadors production, recast, has opened to enthusiastic reviews, while the original production has achieved transfer to New York. Hampton's triumphant success in dramatizing Laclos's novel deserves the closest attention.


2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 758-764
Author(s):  
Nisreen Tawfiq Yousef

This paper examines representations of the Islamic East in two novels by Sir Walter Scott: Ivanhoe (1820) and The Talisman (1825). The paper’s argument is that Scott’s representations of the Islamic East seems influenced in very specific ways by dominant nineteenth-century portrayals of the East. Scott’s two novels present ambivalent depictions of the East, some of which deviate from standard patterns of representation of earlier centuries. For instance, on the one hand his novels attribute positive spiritual qualities to Saracens such as generosity, bravery and kindness to animals, while on the other, and often in the same passage, they sometimes depict Saracens as violent and atavistic. I argue that, through his various narrators and characters, Scott depicts the relationship between the Islamic East and the Christian West as a significant form of cultural interaction whereby the East is presented as complementing the West. However, Scott’s portrayal of East-West relation is complex, and it would be inaccurate to claim that this denotes total acceptance of Islamic manners, customs and perspectives. 


1988 ◽  
Vol 25 (6) ◽  
pp. 801-809 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Arkani-Hamed ◽  
D. W. Strangway

A low-pass filtered aeromagnetic map of southern Vancouver Island is inverted into a magnetization-contrast map that illustrates the lateral variations in the magnetization of the crust. The Island Intrusions and the West Coast Crystalline Complex are characterized by high magnetization relative to the other lithologic groups. The Island Intrusions form an almost continuous pluton in the deeper part of the crust. The low-magnetic Leech River Formation thickens northward. The almost uniform magnetic signature of the Leech River Formation in the east–west direction indicates that the crustal structure revealed from the Lithoprobe seismic results is typical throughout the formation west of the Survey Mountain fault. A low-magnetic zone, elongated in the northwest–southeast direction, cuts through the high-magnetic Metchosin basalts from the southern tip of the island to the Leech River fault. It coincides with the Sooke gabbros exposed in the southern tip of the island, implying that the gabbros probably cut the entire Metchosin basalts at depth.


2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melody Fonseca

Over the last decade, a call for decolonisation has challenged IR scholarship. The call has advocated for the need to decolonise the epistemology and ontology of the discipline, critically engaging with the legacies of imperialism, colonialism, racism, and patriarchy in global power relations. Parallel to the decolonial project, a call to globalise International Relations has been made by well-known scholars in recent years predominantly through the Global IR project. In this review essay of four books I briefly engage with the debates around Global IR and its critics drawing on a decolonial perspective. On the one hand, I discuss the potentialities and limitations of historiographical deconstruction as a methodological tool, raising issues with the current silencing of the ‘present’ due to the continued coloniality of knowledge. On the other hand, I delve into the wide range of possibilities that a serious and critical commitment to diversifying the discipline of IR might bring to academics in the so-called non-West/Global South. I analyse current critiques of Global IR considering them necessary though, in some cases, agents for the reification and silencing of the interests of the non-West/Global South. I argue that, whilst coloniality operates in multiple ways, decoloniality is also a project that surpasses the ideal total exteriority as imagined through the West/non-West dichotomy. Relaciones Internacionales Globales y Dominación Occidental: ¿Avance o entrampamiento eurocéntrico?


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