The Modern Ottoman Identity

The research aims to investigate the how between Ottoman heritage and modern secular identity in the novels of Orhan Pamuk, with particular attention to the ways in which his fiction negotiates Turkey’s position between Orient and Occident. Pamuk’s works consistently highlight the persistence of Ottoman-Islamic traditions within a nation that, following the reforms of the twentieth century, has sought to redefine itself through Western models of modernity and secularism. By engaging with this cultural duality, his novels reflect not only Turkey’s historical transition but also the broader question of how societies reconcile inherited traditions with competing demands of modern life.

Focusing on novels including My Name is Red, Snow, and The Museum of Innocence, the study examines Pamuk’s narrative strategies in portraying cultural hybridity, ideological conflict, and the interplay between memory and modernity. My Name is Red dramatises the artistic and intellectual encounter between Ottoman miniature painting and European Renaissance aesthetics; Snow stages the ideological struggles between religion and secularism in contemporary Turkey; while The Museum of Innocence explores themes of memory, nostalgia, and the afterlives of cultural belonging in a rapidly modernising society. Together, these texts reveal Pamuk’s sustained preoccupation with the unresolved tension between East and West as lived experience.

The research will be situated within the frameworks of cultural memory studies, postcolonial hybridity, and nostalgia studies, offering a critical lens through which to explore Pamuk’s engagement with history and identity. By positioning his fiction at the intersection of Ottoman legacies and secular modernity, this project seeks to contribute to current scholarship on the role of literature in negotiating cultural memory and national identity in Turkey. In doing so, it also offers broader insights into the ways literature articulates the lived complexities of societies situated between different cultural and ideological worlds.