Vanquishing mirages: nations and nationalisms in Barry Unsworth’s The Rage of the Vulture and Orhan Pamuk’s Silent House
Year: 2023
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: Vanquishing mirages: nations and nationalisms in Barry Unsworth's The Rage of the Vulture and Orhan Pamuk's Silent House In 1992, in his seminal work, The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama predicted the end of narrow-gauge nationalisms and the eventual victory of liberal democracy (Fukuyama 1992), the system which was to ultimately rewrite history by substituting political-nationalistic trends with economic preoccupations, in Europe and elsewhere.The termination of the cold war and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 indeed created a vision of the new Europe, while the ensuing expansion of the European Union in the early 21st century, which included countries like Poland and Hungary, seemed to carry the assurance of international cooperation and, in the Schengen area, visa free traffic.The unrest in Ukraine in 2013 and 2014, the on-going war between Russia and Ukraine in the Donbas region, the European migration crisis resulting from the war in Syria in 2015, Brexit in 2020, as well as the migration crisis of 2021 and the full-scale Russian military aggression against Ukraine, clearly demonstrate that we are far from envisaging "that there are no countries", to paraphrase John Lennon's song 'Imagine.'Thus, instead of concentrating on re-building the world after the global pandemic of Covid-19 and opening up borders, the contemporary world-politics resonates with conflict-based creeds, redolent of earlier xenophobic tendencies that can be found in the two texts selected for further analysis.The present paper examines Barry Unsworth's The Rage of the Vulture (1982) and Orhan Pamuk's Silent House (1983), novels depicting Turkey and Europe in times of change.Unsworth shows the end of the Ottoman Empire mainly through the eyes of a British man who becomes entangled in the Armenian cause, but offers also the point of view of the Sultan Abdul Hamid II. 1 Pamuk narrates the transformation of Turkey after the takeover by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk through the memories of an old woman and the experiences of her grandchildren.For both Unsworth and Pamuk, the vicissitudes of the imagemaking are tied with the (re-)construction of the national identities of com-
Source: V&R unipress eBooks
Author: Liliana Sikorska
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4389308673