Literature · Modern & Contemporary Literature
A topic within Modern & Contemporary Literature, itself one of 11 topics in that field and part of Literature.
No prior grounding assumed.
Nobel Lecture: My Father's Suitcase
Orhan Pamuk · 2006
Uses the discovery of his father's unpublished manuscripts to argue that writing a novel is a solitary act of patience whose real subject is always…
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Nobel Lecture: The Tender Narrator
Olga Tokarczuk · 2019
Proposes a 'tender narrator' who tells a story from beyond any single self, arguing that the traditional first-person, human-centred narrator the…
3 works
Orhan Pamuk
Uses the discovery of his father's unpublished manuscripts to argue that writing a novel is a solitary act of patience whose real subject is always the writer's own secret wound, however far the story itself ranges from autobiography.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Kazuo Ishiguro
Reviews his own novels to argue that fiction's essential task is not to entertain or instruct but to communicate feeling across borders and generations, and warns that an increasingly fractured, unequal world is making that shared feeling harder to sustain.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Olga Tokarczuk
Proposes a 'tender narrator' who tells a story from beyond any single self, arguing that the traditional first-person, human-centred narrator the novel inherited is no longer adequate to a world of fragmented facts and ecological crisis.
link checked 17 Sept 2026