Reading Istanbul with Orhan Pamuk and Latife Tekin: interpreting and (re)producing the city-text from centre to periphery

This paper investigates the representation of urban space in contemporary Turkish novel by focusing in particular on the case of Istanbul. According to cultural semiotics, a city can be conceived as a text disseminated of signs and symbols referring to plural narratives and discourses of both collective and individual self. In this article, I adopt such a fascinating metaphor to analyse Orhan Pamuk and Latife Tekin’s poetics of Istanbul. In doing so I consider each author as a peculiar reader of the city-text where memory represents the main key for the interpretation and the (re)production of urban spaces and landscapes. Moreover through a comparison between Pamuk’s novel Kara Kitap (“The Black Book”, 1990) and autobiography İstanbul Hatıralar ve Şehir (“Istanbul Memories and the City”, 2003) and Tekin’s novels Sevgili Arsız Ölüm (“Dear Shameless Death”, 1983) and Berci Kristin Çöp Masalları (“Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills”,1984) I evaluate the relationship between memory and the representation of the city from a centre/periphery perspective.