About

Erdag Göknar is Associate Professor of Turkish in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University and a former director of the Duke Middle East Studies Center. He is a scholar of literary and cultural studies and an award-winning translator whose research and publications focus on intersections of literature and politics in Turkey and the Middle East; specifically, on late Ottoman legacies in contemporary Turkish fiction, historiography, and popular culture. His work includes a monograph titled 'Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel' and translations of notable authors such as Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Orhan Pamuk, and Atiq Rahimi. His current project explores themes of cosmopolitanism, political violence, and the Allied occupation of Istanbul after World War I.

Research topics

• History
• Literature
• Art
• Philosophy
• Ancient history

Selected publications

• The postsecular imaginaries of Orhan Pamuk’s novels

  Literature and Theology · 2024-06-01

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  Abstract This article argues that Orhan Pamuk’s literary innovations bring formations of religion and secularism separated by ideologies of Turkish modernization and cultural revolution into productive parity. Pamuk’s depictions of the Ottoman Islamic past and its legacies—including its material culture, everyday practices, and Sufism—articulate mystical and religious tropes along with the material and secular culture of the nation-state. His eleven novels published between 1982 and 2022 dramatize what I term Turkish “postsecular imaginaries,” in which cultural representations and practices of religion and state are increasingly reinterpreted as being synchronic, interrelated, and imbricated. These manifestations of postsecularism inform both contemporary Turkish literary modernity and the conditions of a debated Turkish postcoloniality, which interrogates sites of European, Ottoman, and Turkish Republican state power.

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• Orhan Pamuk

  2023-04-22

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  Orhan Pamuk, one of the foremost practitioners of the global novel today, writes with a focus on Turkish culture, history, and politics while engaging techniques of world literature. Most of his work is set in Istanbul, Turkey, the former capital of the Ottoman Empire, and the city of his birth (1952). After graduating high school (the American Robert College, Istanbul), he studied architecture before receiving a degree in journalism from Istanbul University. Pamuk devoted himself to painting until the age of twenty-two before he decided to become a novelist. He published his first novel, Cevdet Bey and Sons (1982 Turkish; 2023 English), a three-generation saga ranging from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic, when he was thirty. Pamuk is a faithful practitioner of what is termed the “East-West novel” genre in Turkish literature, which addresses fraught encounters of modernity between Ottoman or Turkish Muslim and European cultures. Pamuk’s first three novels recapitulate techniques of literary form from realism to modernism and to postmodernism. His fourth novel The Black Book (1990 Turkish; 1994 English), is an urban palimpsest of 1970s Istanbul that holds cult status in Turkey. Mixing and melding multiple genres from the historical novel to romance and the detective story to the political novel and autobiography, common tropes in Pamuk’s work include the double, identity, coups, obsessive love, Sufism/Islam, conspiracy, and murder mystery. With the publication of My Name is Red (1998 Turkish; 2001 English), a historical mystery about Islamic book arts, and Snow (2002 Turkish; 2004 English), a novel of coups and conspiracies with contemporary relevance, he became an author of global stature. Pamuk writes with a strong tone of loss and lament, which he describes as a form of collective melancholy that he identifies as hüzün. A public intellectual, he at times struggled with being a secular liberal author writing in a nationalistic Sunni Muslim majority country. In 2005 he was put on trial in Turkey for “insulting Turkishness” for comments he made in a Swiss interview about the Armenian genocide and Kurdish massacres in the late Ottoman and Turkish republican eras, respectively. The case was later dismissed. At the age of fifty-four, in 2006, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Pamuk’s subsequent work reflects the idea of the novelist as archivist and curator, perhaps best exemplified in the Museum of Innocence project that began with a novel in 2009, then an actual brick-and-mortar museum that opened in Istanbul in 2012, as well as a museum catalog and later a documentary film in 2015. His work, informed by intertextual allusions to the classics of Turkish and world literature, has been translated into over sixty languages and has sold over fifteen million copies globally. In recent years, Pamuk has expanded his aesthetic focus into photography and painting.

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• The Grammar of Conspiracy in Orhan Pamuk's Snow

  2023-02-28

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  The could a Turkish novel about conspiracism help us better understand Turkey’s political transition from the 1997 soft coup to the 2016 failed coup Books on conspiracy theories constitute a popular genre in Turkey. The protagonists of conspiracy novels are often journalists or amateur investigators, who find themselves inadvertently pulling on a small thread that unravels a vast conspiracy implicating a group, the government, or the state. Pamuk’s novel Snow dramatizes aspects of conspiracy, repeatedly tracing links between conspiratorial discourse and political violence. The relationship between disinformation and authoritarianism is significant to understanding the function of conspiracies. Conspiracy theories are predicated on fictions that explain complex, confusing, rapidly changing, and threatening events and make them legible. In dramatizing conspiratorial thought, Snow self-consciously depicts Turkish engagements with transnational ideologies such as Marxism, ethnic nationalism, and Islamism. Pamuk’s sustained narrative engagement with conspiracies and coups finds its fullest development in Snow.

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• The Limits of “Whiteness” in Orhan Pamuk’s Fiction

  2022-01-01 · 1 citations

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  Dieser Sammelband enthält achtzehn Beiträge zum Werk Orhan Pamuks, eines der führenden Autoren der türkischen Gegenwartsliteratur. Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler mit Wirkungsstätte in der Türkei, in West- und Mitteleuropa und in den USA erörtern verschiedene Fragestellungen seines literarischen Schaffens, darunter Erzähltechnik, seine Verarbeitung historischer, gesellschaftlicher, politischer und kultureller Phänomene, Aspekte der Intertextualität und Intermedialität, Genre-Fragen und Fragestellungen der Rezeption in verschiedenen Ländern. Die akademischen Beiträge in englischer Sprache bieten einer literaturwissenschaftlich interessierten internationalen Leserschaft neue Einsichten und Zugänge zu Pamuks Werk. Mit Beiträgen von Fatih Altuğ , Zeynep Arıkan Yılmaz, Gunvald Axner Ims, Esra Canpalat, Johanna Chovanec, Sylwia Filipowska, Erdağ Göknar, Sibel Irzık, Hasan Bulent Kahraman, Halim Kara, Piotr Kawulok, Erol Köroğlu, Petr Kučera, Aysel Özdilek, Julian Rentzsch, Monika Schmitz-Emans, Zeynep Tüfekçioğlu-Yanaşmayan, Zeynep Uysal und Simge Yılmaz.

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• The AKP’s Rhetoric of Rule in TurkeyPolitical Melodramas of Conspiracy from “Ergenekon” to “Mastermind”

  2020-08-06 · 3 citations

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  In 2008 the Turkish Constitutional Court was one vote shy of banning the ruling AKP for “anti-secular activity.” In response, the AKP began articulating a series of political conspiracy narratives, amplified through the media. Blurring the line between representation and reality, these political melodramas set the stage for the exercise of state power through the weaponization of investigations and judicial retaliation against the military and the opposition. From 2008 to 2013, the “Ergenekon” conspiracy depicted an anti-Islamist deep state organization and its involvement in illegal activities including military coups and assassinations—as if it actually existed. The Ergenekon conspiracy (and attendant trials) initiated a profound change in Turkish politics by breaking the power of the traditional secular-military alliance. In 2014, Ergenekon led to a spin-off called “Mastermind”, which targeted the AKP’s erstwhile ally and political rival the Gülen Hizmet (or “Service”) Movement, a transnational Islamic educational and media network led by imam Fetullah Gülen. Gülenists, with their strong presence in the police and judiciary, had been instrumental in the Ergenekon prosecutions. Mastermind was later credited with the anti-AKP Gezi protests and a corruption investigation into then Prime Minister Erdoğan in 2013 as well as for the 2016 failed coup. Relying on a literary-cultural analysis of the political field, this chapter argues that conspiracism in Turkey has functioned to prefigure and legitimate authoritarian governance, whether secular or Islamist. I redefine conspiracy theories as popular fictions indexed to political movements that can instrumentalize legal and electoral processes for the accumulation of state power and the undermining of democratic pluralism.

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• Conspiracy Theory in Turkey: Politics and Protest in the Age of "Post-Truth" by Julian de Medeiros (review)

  The Middle East Journal · 2019-01-01

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• <em>Yasak</em>/Banned from Sultan Abdülhamid II to President Erdoğan: Reappropriating the Past and the Subjectivities of Censorship

  Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association · 2018-01-01

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  Erdağ Göknar, Kent F. Schull, Yasak/Banned from Sultan Abdülhamid II to President Erdoğan: Reappropriating the Past and the Subjectivities of Censorship, Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, Vol. 5, No. 2, Yasak/Banned from Sultan Abdülhamid II to President Erdoğan (Fall 2018), pp. 9-12

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• Chapter 11 Reimaging the Ottoman Legacy

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2018-11-16

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• Reading Occupied Istanbul: Turkish Subject-Formation from Historical Trauma to Literary Trope

  Culture, theory and critique/Culture, theory & critique · 2014-02-07 · 21 citations

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  The Allied occupation of Istanbul is a little-known historical event outside of Turkey and the Middle East. European powers occupied Istanbul between 1918 and 1923 to enforce the partition of the Ottoman Empire after WWI in the construction of the Modern Middle East. Almost 100 Turkish novels that address occupied Istanbul have appeared over the last ninety years, beginning even before Allied armies left Istanbul in 1923. Turkey's present Middle Eastern re-emergence and post-Kemalist reassessment of secular modernity has also led writers and intellectuals back to the occupation of Istanbul. To examine why Turkish authors return repeatedly to the trope of occupied Istanbul, this essay surveys the first canonised novels about occupied Istanbul written during the Kemalist monoparty period (1923–50): Shirt of Flame by the exiled feminist and nationalist Halide Edib (1884–1964), Sodom and Gomorrah by the Kemalist ideologue Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu (1889–1974) and Outside the Scene by Turkey's first experimental, modernist author Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1902–62). As bilingual Istanbul intellectuals, all three made occupied Istanbul a central drama in their fictions. However, each represented it differently as a formative event in the construction and critique of the nation-state and of modern Turkish subject-formation.

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• Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy

  2013-02-15 · 28 citations

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  Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy is the first critical study of all of Pamuk’s novels, including the early untranslated work. In 2005 Orhan Pamuk was charged with "insulting Turkishness" under Article 301 of the Turkish penal code. Eighteen months later he was awarded the Nobel Prize. After decades of criticism for wielding a depoliticized pen, Pamuk was cast as a dissident through his trial, an event that underscored his transformation from national literateur to global author. By contextualizing Pamuk’s fiction into the Turkish tradition and by defining the literary and political intersections of his work, Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy rereads Pamuk's dissidence as a factor of the form of his novels. This is not a traditional study of literature, but a book that turns to literature to ask larger questions about recent transformations in Turkish history, identity, modernity, and collective memory. As a corrective to common misreadings of Pamuk’s work in its international reception, Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy applies various analytical lenses to the politics of the Turkish novel, including gender studies, cultural translation, historiography, and Islam. The book argues that modern literature that confronts representations of the nation-state, or devlet, with those of Ottoman, Islamic, and Sufi contexts, or din, constitute "secular blasphemies" that redefine the politics of the Turkish novel. Concluding with a meditation on conditions of "untranslatability" in Turkish literature, this study provides a comprehensive and critical analysis of Pamuk’s novels to date.

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Frequent coauthors

• Reşat Kasaba

  University of Washington

  3 shared

• Orhan Pamuk

  Harvard University Press

  1 shared

• Carter Vaughn Findley

  1 shared

• Levent

  1 shared

• Hamit Bozarslan

  1 shared

• Ümit Cizre

  Istanbul Şehir University

  1 shared

• Kent F. Schull

  Binghamton University

  1 shared

• Andrew andrew

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Two NEA literature fellowships (translation)
• Two Fulbright awards
• Residential fellowships at the National Humanities Center
• Residential fellowships at the Stanford Humanities Center