Читать книгу Re-Imagining and Re-Placing New York and Istanbul - Hatice Bay - Страница 8

Abstract

This study is a comparative study of Paul Auster’s and Orhan Pamuk’s urban novels and characters. It is interested in exploring and examining the ways the urban protagonists of Auster’s New York and Pamuk’s Istanbul novels experience their respective cities dynamically and constitute their identities around them constructively and ethically. For this purpose Auster’s and Pamuk’s city novels will be analyzed within the frameworks of Michel Foucault's “heterotopia” and Homi Bhabha's “the Third Space,” respectively. Furthermore, for the discussion of the nature of the self and the other as well as their relationship, Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics will be deployed. It is argued that examining the city novels and characters of Auster and Pamuk through the prisms of Foucault, Bhabha and Levinas establishes a new critical framework that gives a constructive and optimistic angle to the negative late twentieth century and the early twenty-first century discourses on the city and its inhabitants. Therefore, I argue that Auster’s and Pamuk’s urban subjects re-imagine the ways in which the city can be transformed into heterotopic, and Third Spaces and inhabitants may become response-able for and attentive to their immediate surroundings, to their national or personal histories and, most importantly, to other people. At the same time, by bringing these two different cities, cultures and authors together, I aim to problematize geographical enclosures and complicate such spatial categories and ideologies as “East,” “West,” center, periphery, belated and advanced.