Aesthetic engagement with the Orient differs fundamentally from appropriative documentary mastery

Evidence

Rather—by contrast with such writers as Lane (from whom both men borrowed shamelessly), Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Renan, Sacy—their Orient was not so much grasped, appropriated, reduced, or codified as lived in, exploited aesthetically and imaginatively as a roomy place full of possibility. What mattered to them was the structure of their work as an independent, aesthetic, and personal fact, and not the ways by which, if one wanted to, one could effectively dominate or set down the Orient graphically. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 461

Categorization

• DEFINE: Spells out the opposition between ‘grasped/appropriated/codified’ and ‘lived in/aesthetically exploited’ Orient — a vocabulary distinction worth carrying forward.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 461