A Pedagogy of Two Ways of Seeing:
A Confrontation of "Word and Image" in My Name is Red

by FERIDE ÇIÇEKOGLU

The novel of Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red, recently the center of controversy, not only in its homeland Turkey but in all the countries where it was translated, focuses on the debates around image-making in late sixteenth-century Istanbul, then the Ottoman capital. It is also a contemporary tale. Its focus is not only the tradition of miniature painting during the Ottoman period in particular, but also the tradition of Western painting. Above all, My Name is Red is a detective and love story, starting with a murder and resolving the mystery at the end, like many other novels in this genre. What is unique is the role that the confrontation of different traditions of painting, Western and Islamic, and that between "word and image" play in the resolution of the love story and the solving of the mystery.