Re-Imagining and Re-Placing New York and Istanbul. Hatice Bay
1.1 Heterotopia as Differential Textual Sites
1.2 Heterotopia as Absolutely Other Real Spaces
1.3 Heterotopia after Foucault
1.4 Heterotopology I: The Entangled Interplay of Spaces of Power and Resistance
1.5 Heterotopology II: Spatialized Historiography
1.6 Theorizing Levinas’s Ethics
1.7 Levinas: Towards an Understanding of the Ethical Embodied Subject
1.9 The Passivity of the Subject
1.10 The Traumatization of the Self
2 The Construction of Heterotopias of Deviation and the Ethical Self in City of Glass
3 Gaze-To-Gaze, Flesh-To-Flesh: Glimpses of Alterity and Altericidal Relations in Ghosts
4 The Construction of the Listening Eye/I in The Locked Room
5 In the Country of Last Things: A Journey into a Thousand of Heterotopias of Resistance
6 Heterotopical Investigations into History/Time and Geography/Space in Moon Palace
1 Theorizing the Third Space within the Turkish Context
1.2 Theorizing the Third Space
1.3 The Third Space as a Politically and Ethically Enunciative Site
1.7 Third Space as Hybridity and Cultural Translation
1.8 The Third Space as an “Extra”-National Performative Space
2 Unhomely Ethics and Radical Fellowship in The White Castle
3 The Inscription of Belatedness as Extra-Modernity in The Black Book
4 Identity and Memory Wars, and Glimpses of Hybridity in the Third Space of My Name is Red
This study mainly examines Paul Auster’s New York and Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul novels in the way the urban protagonists experience their respective cities and re-construct their own identities around them. As far as the theoretical framework is concerned, Foucault’s concept of “heterotopia” and the idea of “The Third Space” theorized by Homi Bhabha are used for Auster’s and Pamuk’s novels, respectively. Furthermore, for Auster and Pamuk make the other person and the spaces of the other person central to reimagining subjectivity, Levinas’s ethics will also be employed as an interpretive strategy. While the present study will be breaking new ground in the application of the theories of Foucault to New York City, Bhabha to Istanbul and Levinas to both of them, it is at the same time the first study to bring Auster’s and Pamuk’s works together and establish a dialogue between these two very different textual universes and cultures that are poles apart. Moreover, Auster and Pamuk are chosen for this study in order to challenge the contemporary theories on the crises of the urban spaces and urban dwellers. Bringing Auster’s and Pamuk’s works together illuminates the need for a reevaluation of the contemporary negative outlook on the city and its inhabitants. That is, this study will expand the reader’s awareness and understanding of how spaces and their inhabitants can be viewed from a positive angle. Thus, it is the aim of this comparative approach to present the reader with more nuanced, complex and diversified sets of examples about how urban individuals, from two very different cities, might transform themselves and approach their own cities creatively, constructively and ethically. In a wider context, by bringing Auster and Pamuk together, I aim to challenge spatial and cultural stereotyping and dismantle commonly held beliefs about Americanness and Turkishness and thus pave the way for looking at discourses such as “clash of civilizations,” “margin” (Istanbul) and “center” (New York), the belated and the advanced from a critical point of view. It is hoped that putting into dialogue such different cities and writers together, this study disrupts discriminatory discourses, otherings, negative stereotypes which every city, region and nation constructs about one another. Therefore, a comparative point of view is believed to effect reconciliation of opposed geographic, cultural, and political locations and spaces.
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1.1 Urban and Identity Crises in the Humanities and Social Sciences
The following part extensively focuses on the current debates and literary imaginings about the crises of the city and its dwellers that emerged towards the end of the twentieth century in social sciences and urban literature. In addition, I will point out how urban spaces and subjects in the works of Auster and Pamuk have also so far been underestimated by many critics. Thus, this study gives an insight into the dominant but incomplete discourses about contemporary cities and their dwellers and provides one of the reasons behind my re-analyzing and bringing Auster’s and Pamuk’s city novels together.
For decades, in literary imagination, the pre-modern and modern city has had a dynamic unity and cultural distinctiveness. Although it has often been portrayed as a realm of sin, corruption, and downfall, it could still be read as a text. As Zeynep Harputlu in “Mapping Poverty in Late-Victorian Fiction” points out, the urban poor of George Gissing’s and Arthur Morrison’s city novels, for instance, are “explicitly identified