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Gowher Ahmad Naik, Lovely Professional University Unit 20: Edward Said's Crisis [In Orientalism]: Textual Analysis

Unit 20: Edward Said's Crisis [In Orientalism]: Notes
Textual Analysis

CONTENTS
Objectives
Introduction
20.1 Orientalism
20.2 Edward Said's Crisis
20.3 Textual Analysis
20.4 Summary
20.5 Key-Words
20.6 Review Questions
20.7 Further Readings

Objectives

After reading this Unit students will be able to:
• Understand Orientalism.
• Discuss Textual Analysis, Edward Said's Crisis.

Introduction

Edward Said is a Palestinian, who was educated in Palestine and Egypt when those countries
were under British jurisdiction, and subsequently in the United States. He is Parr Professor of
English and Cooperative Literature at Columbia University, New York. Said's first book was
critical study of Conrad, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966), that took a
phenomenological approach to its subject, but was recognizably within the tradition of Anglo-
American 'New Criticism'. Said was one of the first critics in America to respond to the challenge
of European structuralist and post-structuralist theory, and his thoughtful, sometimes anxious
reflections upon these developments may be traced in his books Beginnings (1975) and The World,
the Text and the Critic (1983). Said has disliked the increasing hermiticism of deconstructive
criticism, and has been drawn to Marxist and Foucauldian analyses of literature and culture as
sites of political and ideological struggle. In Orientalism (1978) he found a rewarding subject for
such an approach, and, in Culture and Imperialism (1993), he examined his earlier premises in
relation to the Western canon. Orientalism is the discourse of the West about the East, a huge body
of texts—literary, topographical, anthropological, historical, sociological—that has been
accumulating since the Renaissance. Said, concentrating his attention on writing about the Near
East, is concerned to show how this discourse is at once self-validating, constructing certain
stereotypes which become accepted as self-evident facts, and also in conscious or unconscious
collusion with political and economic imperialism. 'Taking the late eighteenth century as a very
roughly defined starting point,' says Said, in the introduction to his book, 'Orientalism can be
discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient -- dealing with it
by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, setting it,
ruling over it: in short Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having
authority over the Orient.' Said is uniquely qualified to undertake such a study, and Orientalism
impressively combines political passion with wide-ranging scholarship. The following extract,
called simply 'Crisis' in the original text, conclude the first section of the book, entitled 'The Scope
of Orientalism'.

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