Sensorial Objects As Connectors and Carriers of Material Culture and History

Countering the opinion that Pamuk is an '“an Orientalist” who “plays for the West”' (Dufft 67; Göktürk et al. 2010) and that his postmodernist techniques displace him from 'any modern history of Turkish fiction' (Almond 76), I argue that Pamuk's 'Innocence' corpus engages with preoccupations specific to Turkish literature – namely, the debate around “innocence”, catalysed by the 1980 coup. Two antagonistic concepts of “innocence” are operative in the corpus, the first emerging out of Turkey's pre-1980 tradition of politically-engaged literature, which measured “innocence” by the text's compassionate commitment to Otherness. Following the enforced disarticulation of the political in the post-coup cultural environment, “innocence” also came to connote the novelist's a-politicism and aesthetic innovation was seen to celebrate the autotelic, ideologically “innocent” text. In the previous chapter, I demonstrated that Kemal's determination to see  Füsun and 'the very essence of life' (MI293) as uniformly coincidental with himself and his treatment of Füsun's objects as autotelic, illustrates this second concept of “innocence” and re-enacts the problem of solipsism that plagues post-1980 Turkish fiction. However, this chapter suggests that when the corpus is considered as a co-constitutive whole, the “guilty” associations that objects acquire through the solipsistic tendencies of the novel are rehabilitated by the museum's exhibits, which convey narratives of Otherness that have been rendered taboo in the current political climate. By considering the 'effects and alliances' (Harman “Heidegger” 75) between objects in the 'Innocence' corpus, this project elucidates how Pamuk strategizes “innocence” in a literary environment that has been pervasively preoccupied with the high political stakes involved in such a claim.

The present study focuses  on  the  experience  of  contemporary  creators  and  collaborating archaeologists, aiming to reinstate aspects of the ancient world through the reconstruction of garments, jewels, vases, perfumes, etc. The aim of the research was to delineate the relationship between the different senses and the creative process and their contribution to a multisensory approach to the ancient world that enriches contemporary aesthetic perception  and  the  understanding  of  elusive  aspects  of  antiquity.

The Western Front is one of the most iconic and resonant cultural landscapes to have emerged in modern history. The area continues to have a magnetic draw for tourists from many countries even as the First World War (1914-18) slips from private lived experience into historical memory. Tourists have been visiting the Western Front in Belgium and France ever since the war ended and the Centenary of the conflict (2014-18) is now amplifying this interest. Tourism has added an important new dimension to the socio-economic impact of the war. Tourists come to see and to understand; they seek connection with events stimulated by rich and varied cultural representations such as film, TV documentary, theatre and a buoyant war publishing industry. They engage with an “emotional geography” of cemeteries, museums and visitor centres which serve to ‘incarnate the facts’ of this enormously imaginative landscape.
This chapter examines the way tourists utilise their senses in the way they seek to understand the Western Front.  It includes a discussion of the ‘official’ heritage narrative expressed through both public and private museums and visitor centres as well as more private experiences of tourists.  Tourists come to seek meaning through a process of engagement with the memory and heritage of war. This can be a complex process because ‘heritage…is not an inherited essence but an experienced process; a process in which our emotions and feelings are enmeshed with our thoughts’ (Schorch 2014: 22). The senses are important in this process in that an encounter with heritage in ‘an interpretive context can be achieved through multisensory and embodied performances, a sensory and emotive contextualisation leading to an ‘internal understanding’ and empathy’ (Schorch 2014: 28). Although this relates primarily to museum interpretation it is clear that the senses are a key aspect of any ‘internal understanding’ of a ‘heritage-scape’ like the Western Front.