Orientalism’s novelty lay in combinatory scope rather than new knowledge

Evidence

What was new, I must repeat, was the combination, the reach of erudition, the architecture of the book, the eloquence that went with it, even though this eloquence, too, had the tendency to be frightfully repetitive at times. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 318

Categorization

• XREF: A close study in how a book’s architecture and canon-reassembly can feel new even when its individual findings are familiar — parallels discussions of curation as originality in the digital-age reading-list debates. — connects to: Distant ancient Eastern history clarifies repeated modern trends; Intellectual originality can consist of synthesizing foreign sources rather than innovating — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 59

Related

• Orientalism’s influence owed more to narrative breadth than to its theses (similarity 0.82)
• Intellectual originality can consist of synthesizing foreign sources rather than innovating (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalism is only the visible tip of a larger modern structure. (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalists recycled predecessors’ texts instead of observing the real Orient (similarity 0.80)
• Orientalism operates as a constraint on thought, not a positive doctrine. (similarity 0.80)
• Orientalism functions as a systemic structure embedded in the modern project (similarity 0.80)
• Orientalism functions as a self-enclosed Western text rather than knowledge of an actual Orient. (similarity 0.79)
• Orientalism’s claim to scholarly attention rests on its uniqueness among fields (similarity 0.79)
• Orientalism turned scattered testimony into a domesticated, categorical simulacrum of the Orient (similarity 0.78)
• Orientalist scholarship claimed universal comprehension of Eastern peoples (similarity 0.78)
• Orientalism is chiefly a British and French cultural enterprise (similarity 0.78)
• Generalizing knowledge-power critique would erase Orientalism’s special status (similarity 0.78)