Cultural Amnesia and the Paradox of Modernity: Memory, Forgetting, and Urban Transformation in Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories of the City

Abstract

This study engages with Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City (2003) to explore cultural amnesia in light of memory studies. Drawing on Andreas Huyssen, Paul Connerton, and Assmann, it argues that modernity produces a paradoxical configuration in which an obsession with memory coexists with structurally and politically supported mechanisms of forgetting. The research analyzes the memoir to articulate four interrelated domains of cultural forgetting: urban reformation as topographical erasure, selected reclamation of history, loss through representation, and the way hüzün opens a productive space for concession to the future. These results show Istanbul represented as a space where memory survives in scattered pieces while historical continuity dissolves. This study contributes to memory studies and literary scholarship on Pamuk by demonstrating how his memoir figures the emblematic twinning of memory and forgetting as a defining trait of modern cultural experience.