2012 Guest Lectures

Our 2012 guest lecturers included Djelal Kadir, Kader Konuk and Orhan Pamuk


The star of our program was the Turkish novelist and 2006 Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk. In a plenary discussion on the topic “The World in the Novel, the Novel in the World,” he unfolded the complex relations between life, literature, cultural inheritance and political issues from the point of view of a writer who now belongs not only to his national literature, but also to the world.


Djelal Kadir, Edwin Earle Sparks Professor of Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University, gave an opening keynote address offering new insights on “Theory in World Literature,” arguing for the longstanding inscription of theory within literary texts around the world.



In her lecture “East-West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey,” Kader Konuk, Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, looked into the origins of 20th century world literature theory through the work of Erich Auerbach, who as a refugee from Nazi Germany interacted closely with Turkish colleagues – with a much fuller engagement with the world around him than his closing comments in Mimesis suggest.