The physical format of Orientalist pages shapes how readers apprehend the Orient

Evidence

I attach a great deal of significance to the appearance of and to the intended model for the Orientalist’s page as a printed object. I have spoken in this book about d’Herbelot’s alphabetic encyclopedia, the gigantic leaves of the Description de l’Égypte, Renan’s laboratory-museum notebook, the ellipses and short episodes of Lane’s Modern Egyptians, Sacy’s anthological excerpts, and so forth. These pages are signs of some Orient, and of some Orientalist, presented to the reader. There is an order to these pages by which the reader apprehends not only the “Orient” but also the Orientalist, as interpreter, exhibitor, personality, mediator, representative (and representing) expert. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 723

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s Scaffolding Theory module — the material/textual form of discourse as a mechanism of knowledge production. — connects to: Reader positions determine what Indian English fiction can signify — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1963
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 723