Research Interests for Erdag Göknar

Research Interests: Turkish cultural studies (literature, history, & politics); Eurasian and Middle Eastern politics of representation; the novel and national historiography; Islam and secularism, translation studies, identity/subjectivity

Primary focus on the legacies of the Ottoman Empire and the Kemalist cultural revolution upon modern Turkey and the Middle East. Secondary focus on cultural translation and representational politics of Turks and Muslims, including regional understandings of Turkey and Islam. Theoretical focus on literature and politics, gender and orientalism, colonialism and nationalism, Islam and modernism, translation and identity.

Keywords:
Literature, History/Historiography, Identity/Subjectivity, Representation, The City/Nation, Translation and Cultural Translation, Ottoman Empire/Turkey
Current projects:
Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel (Routledge, 2013)
Reading Occupied Istanbul: Turkish Subject-Formation from Trauma to Trope (in progress)
A Mind at Peace (translation of Tanpinar novel), Archipelago Books, NY, 2009, 2011
Mediterranean Passages from Dido to Derrida, co-editor, UNC Press, 2008
Areas of Interest:

Ottoman Empire/Turkey
Eurasia/Middle East
Ottoman/Turkish relations with Europe
Narrative Identities
Muslim Nationalism

Representative Publications
  1. Goknar, E, "The Novel in Turkish: From Narrative Tradition to Nobel Prize", in Cambridge History of Turkey: Turkey in the Modern World, edited by Kasaba, R, vol. IV (Fall, 2008), pp. 35-35, Cambridge University Press [catalogue.asp] [abs]
  2. Goknar, E, "Orhan Pamuk and the ’Ottoman’ Theme", World Literature Today, vol. 80 no. 6 (November, 2006)