Chateaubriand made the Orient a projection of his own selfhood

Evidence

Writing was an act of life for Chateaubriand, for whom nothing, not even a distant piece of stone, must remain scriptively untouched by him if he was to stay alive. If the order of Lane’s narrative was to be violated by scientific authority and enormous detail, then Chateaubriand’s was to be transformed into the asserted will of an egoistic, highly volatile individual. Whereas Lane would sacrifice his ego to the Orientalist canon, Chateaubriand would make everything he said about the Orient wholly dependent on his ego. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 446

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Naming the ‘egoistic’ projection of the self onto the Orient connects to colonial psychology and racialized selfhood concepts in the undertaking.

Related

• Orientalist writing can serve as ego-prolongation rather than impersonal scholarship (similarity 0.90)
• Orientalist description gets obliterated by the imperial ego’s projections (similarity 0.86)
• Fear of the Orient’s barren reality gets converted into strengthened European self-assertion (similarity 0.83)
• The Orient served Western travelers as a stage for their own self-creation. (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalist writing was limited to either false generality or private fantasy (similarity 0.82)
• Preconceived personal needs structured the pilgrim’s vision of the Orient (similarity 0.80)
• Aesthetic engagement with the Orient differs fundamentally from appropriative documentary mastery (similarity 0.80)
• All Orientalist writing, even purportedly neutral science, centers a European ego (similarity 0.80)
• Imperial ambition converted scholarly Orientalist study into active colonization (similarity 0.79)
• Even putatively impartial scientific Orientalism remains an egoistic interpretive act that rebuilds its object. (similarity 0.79)
• Western scholarly handling turned the Orient from alien into colonial space (similarity 0.79)
• Orientalist science functions as an ego-driven fiction of European dominion. (similarity 0.79)
• The Orient was framed as a degraded object awaiting European restoration (similarity 0.78)
• By 1850 the Orient had become a self-fashioning career (similarity 0.78)
• Even sympathetic scholars exercised a will to reshape the Orient to their own image (similarity 0.78)