TITLE:
My Name Is Red: Acts of Literature and Translation in the Margins of Cultural Literacy
AUTHORS:
Zelia Gregoriou
KEYWORDS:
Derrida; Pamuk; Nussbaum; Literature; Literary Imagination; Iterabiblity; Performativity; Translation
JOURNAL NAME:
Creative Education,
Vol.4 No.4A,
April
30,
2013
ABSTRACT: Taking as its backdrop the
reception of Orhan Pamuk’s novels in the “West” as meta-commentaries on the “clash of civilizations”, this paper discusses a Derridean approach to the
value of teaching literature in general and teaching literature for cultural
understanding and global citizenship in particular. This approach implicates a
double shift in education perspective: from the cultivation of narrative
imagination to a translational approach to literariness and from Nussbaum’s
definition of cosmopolitanism as development of love for humanity across
concentric circles of identification to a cosmopolitan framing of acts of
literature and translation. This double shift is elucidated in the paper
through a double gesture: first, the engagement with
Derrida’s concepts of iterability, repetition, acts of literature; second, the performative’s
break from context is interlayered with a performative reading of Orhan Pamuk’s
novel My Name Is Red. The paper calls
for an educational philosophy of literature in education that addresses the self-reflexivity of the text rather than
story line, form rather than content of narrative imagination, and politics of
translation rather than translation of cultural others. Cultural literacy and
culturally engaged readings of literature could learn from such an interlayered
performative reading how to preserve translation alive in the other, and, vice versa, how to reenact
adventures of translation towards challenging familiar and reified forms of
cultural identity and not only orientalist images of “mullahs”.