Orientalism’s influence owed more to narrative breadth than to its theses

Evidence

Much work was appearing at the time which had a very similar thrust, but Said managed to construct a larger and more inclusive narrative, across distinct discursive fields and combining a large number of texts, to demonstrate continuities among diverse authors and the underlying mentalities. It was the book’s narrative amplitude which turned out to be its most enabling quality, regardless of its principal theses. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 309

Categorization

• SEED: Angle for an essay: what makes a work intellectually enabling is often its narrative amplitude, not the correctness of its claims — a lesson for ambitious nonfiction.

Related

• Orientalism is only the visible tip of a larger modern structure. (similarity 0.86)
• Orientalism functions as a self-enclosed Western text rather than knowledge of an actual Orient. (similarity 0.85)
• Orientalism must be examined at both the general and the individual level (similarity 0.85)
• Orientalism argued Western literatures were complicit in colonialism (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalism can be pursued as dynamic context rather than inert source-compilation. (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalism’s intent was critique, not affirmation of antithetical identities (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalist scholarship constructs narrative order over the Orient’s supposed nonhistory. (similarity 0.83)
• Said’s critique of Orientalism is inadequate for refashioning the discipline. (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalism functions as a systemic structure embedded in the modern project (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalism operates as a constraint on thought, not a positive doctrine. (similarity 0.83)
• Said’s Orientalism shaped a field mainly through emotive impact (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalist texts reveal the metropolitan culture that produced them most deeply (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalism regularizes how the Orient is taught and administered (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalism is chiefly a British and French cultural enterprise (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalism’s material effectiveness exceeds what a pure history of ideas captures (similarity 0.83)