Gloria Fisk’s Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature (2018) is a timely book, not only because it contributes to the continuing debate on world literature that has occupied literary academic circles since the 1990s but also because it sets out to uncover the immense impact of neoliberalism on academia in the United States. In meeting these two challenges, Fisk chooses to focus on the reception of the work of Orhan Pamuk, who, after being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2006 for peering “into the melancholic soul of his native city,”1 was canonized by US academia as one of the iconic authors of world literature.
In the introduction, Fisk warns the reader not to expect a monograph on a single author. Instead, she takes Pamuk’s oeuvre as a case study in order to ask a set of broader questions concerning “the conditions by which Western literary...
