Weltliteratur und das Missverstehen des Romans : Orhan Pamuks »Masumiyet Müzesi«

The notion of world literature is often understood as a global distribution of literary forms and structures from Europe to the rest of the globe. Under the premise that non-European literatures don't just reproduce European forms, but reinterpret and change them in the process of adaptation, world literature can be defined as a "productive misunderstanding". This article attempts to show that Orhan Pamuk's novel "Masumiyet Müzesi" ("Museum of Innocence") is in this sense a productive appropriation of European forms of the novel. Pamuk's novel is a narration about the modernization of Turkey in the 20th century, which is depicted as a chain of faulty imitation that nevertheless creates something new. Similarly, the "Museum of Innocence" is characterized by an abundance of intertextual relations to the tradition of European novel (e.g., to Proust's texts), which, however creates a "productive misunderstanding".