Europe’s literary repertoire of the Orient half-imagined settings and figures.

Evidence

Unlike the Americans, the French and the British—less so the Germans, Russians, Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, and Swiss—have had a long tradition of what I shall be calling Orientalism, a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience. The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 52 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: European knowledge of the Orient assembled a restricted archive of tropes that controlled novelty; Europe defined itself through a material and cultural image of the Orient — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 52; The Orientalist’s constructed Orient displaced the actual Orient in European discourse (+3 more)

Related

• Europe defined itself through a material and cultural image of the Orient (similarity 0.93)
• European knowledge of the Orient assembled a restricted archive of tropes that controlled novelty (similarity 0.91)
• Europe’s doubt about Oriental novelty serves as its cultural weapon (similarity 0.90)
• Knowledge of the Orient requires conceiving it as ruled by Europe (similarity 0.88)
• A pre-existing European repertoire of Oriental images supplied material for major Western authors (similarity 0.88)
• European modernity defines itself through relation to alien past cultures. (similarity 0.88)
• Eighteenth-century comparative history confronted the Orient partly to know Europe itself (similarity 0.88)
• British imperial presence was conceived as permanently transforming the Orient (similarity 0.88)
• The Orientalist’s constructed Orient displaced the actual Orient in European discourse (similarity 0.87)
• Orient studies served Europe’s needs, not Asia’s reality (similarity 0.87)
• Europeans claimed to possess the Orient’s souls beyond territorial power (similarity 0.87)
• Orientalism operates as both an academic discipline and a repository of cultural images (similarity 0.86)
• Orientalism generated a free-floating mythology detached from actual Orientals (similarity 0.86)
• European representation of the Orient outweighs actual Oriental lived experience (similarity 0.86)
• The real Orient rarely guided European artistic visions of it (similarity 0.85)

Broader Connections

• Europe defined itself through a material and cultural image of the Orient #corroborates (0.78) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 52
• The Orientalist’s constructed Orient displaced the actual Orient in European discourse #expands (0.75)
• European representation of the Orient outweighs actual Oriental lived experience #corroborates (0.72)