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A contribution to: Melancholy

Edited by Joanna Neilly and Alex Stuart

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 6

Modern Humanities Research Association

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Abstract.  Turkish novelist and 2006 Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk’s memoir Istanbul: Şehir ve Hatıralar (Istanbul: Memories and the City) (2003) is a recent addition to the literature on melancholy. In the memoir, Pamuk identifies with the city, and diagnoses its predominant mood as the melancholy of a city in a state of decrepitude. Istanbul in his account is a humanized city suffering from chronic, even pathological, sadness, which transmits its mood to its inhabitants. Pamuk uses a Turkish word, hüzün, denoting a medley of melancholy, sadness and tristesse, to unite the city, its past and its present within a timeless as well as transnational feeling. This article addresses a key question in the context of Pamuk’s personalised understanding: how does melancholy make sense when relating to Istanbul, and, reciprocally, what makes the city’s melancholy, as it arises from Pamuk’s work, stand out from the large body of literature on the term? I respond by tracing the imagery of melancholy in Pamuk's work, in relation to the complex meanings and imagery of the term, to show how they find expression in the memoir.

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