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On 13 November, the Modern and Contemporary Literature research group organizes an online seminar with Ã–zlem Öğüt YazıcıoÄŸlu on the topic of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920) and Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence (2008).

The seminar

Written and set nearly a century apart, both in highly gendered and classed societies of 1870s New York, and late 1970s and early 1980s Istanbul, respectively, The Age of Innocence and The Museum of Innocence are novels that highlight the manifold relations between gender, class, and power, both in their social construction and transformation, and in ways that undermine essentialist conceptions of gender, masculinity and femininity. In various forms of social interaction they portray, the novels disclose the multi-faceted power dynamics that cannot be reduced to dichotomous patterns of hierarchy, such as man/woman, society/individual, high class/low class, which are often conceived of as fixed sets of dominance and subordination.

Özlem Öğüt Yazıcıoğlu

Özlem Öğüt YazıcıoÄŸlu is associate professor in the Department of Western Languages and Literatures at BoÄŸaziçi Ä¾¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ in Istanbul, Turkey. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Purdue Ä¾¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ. Her research areas include the modern and contemporary novel, gender and ethnic studies, animal studies, and ecocriticism. She is the author of Major Minor Literature: Animal and Human Alterity (Simurg, 2017). She is currently Terra Critica Researcher in Residence for the academic year 2020–2021.