53 Crossover Month #2: Novel Dialogue (Orhan Pamuk, Bruce Robbins, JP)

Crossover Month continues with something completely different, and only a little bit incestuous. Novel Dialogue is a new podcast hosted by the awesome Aarthi Vadde of Duke, and RTB’s own JP. John and Aarthi serve as the third wheel (or if you prefer the social lubricant) for a scholar and a novelist who sit down each week to explore the making of novels, and what to make of them. If you like what you hear, please share the love by recommending it to friends, tagging @noveldialogue in your tweets, and subscribing to it via Apple Podcasts Spotify or Stitcher

In Novel Dialogue’s second episode, critic and scholar Bruce Robbins sits down with Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk. They have taught classes on the political novel together at Columbia for years, and it shows. They ask how the novel can ever escape its roots in middle-class sensibility and perspective: Joseph Conrad comes up, and so does modern Brazilian film. Then they discuss the demonic appeal of Russian novels—and why retired military officers produced so many great Turkish translations of Russian novels.

We hear tantalizing details about Pamuk’s forthcoming pandemic novel, Nights of Plague. He discusses his move away from “highbrow ironical postmodernist” fiction and reveals his affection for talking about politics–along with his distaste for what the consequences of speaking out may be. “I am not shy about talking…but there are consequences!”

Mentioned in the Episode:

City of God (Brazilian film, 2002)
Joseph Conrad (Under Western Eyes, Nostromo)
Ivan Turgenev
Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
Karl Marx, “18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Demons (1871-2), A Writer’s Diary,
James Joyce, Dubliners
Louis Aragon, (Zolaesque romances at the end of his career), Aurélien
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita