PPT-12: Romantic Orientalism - Benvenuto

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Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro

Corso di Laurea in Comunicazione Linguistica e Interculturale Curricula: Mediazione Interculturale/Italiano per Stranieri

Letteratura Inglese I

a. a. 2014-2015

Prof. Franca Dellarosa franca.dellarosa@uniba.it

Romanticisms, Nation and Empire

Romantic    Orientalism  

"Romantic Orientalism" — the second term sometimes expanded to "Oriental exoticism" or "Oriental fantasy" — brings together two concepts that continue to be much in dispute among theorists and literary historians. […] "Orientalism" refers to the geography and culture of large parts of Asia and North Africa, plus some of what we now think of as Eastern Europe. Above all, from a British point of view, "Orientalism" connotes foreignness or otherness — things decidedly not British — and it sometimes seems as if the "East" signified by "Orient" is not only what is east of Europe and the Mediterranean but everything east of the English Channel. ‘Romantic Orientalism: Overview’, The Norton Anthology of English Literature – Norton Topics online http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/romantic/topic_4/welcome.htm

In literary history, Romantic Orientalism is the recurrence of recognizable elements of Asian and African place names, historical and legendary people, religions, philosophies, art, architecture, interior decoration, costume, and the like in the writings of the British Romantics. ‘Romantic Orientalism: Overview’

Before the publication of Edward Said's extremely influential and controversial Orientalism (1978), scholars tended to view the Eastern places, characters, and events pervading late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century British literature as little more than stimuli for easy thrills. But this attitude has changed dramatically. Along with its well-studied interests in the inner workings of the mind, connections with nature, and exercise of a transcendental imagination, the Romantic Period in Britain is now recognized as a time of global travel and exploration, accession of colonies all over the world, and development of imperialist ideologies that rationalized the British takeover of distant territories. ‘Romantic Orientalism: Overview’, The Norton Anthology of English Literature – Norton Topics online http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/romantic/topic_4/welcome.htm

Defining Orientalism

Edward Said, Orientalism, New York: Vintage, 1979: 1

Defining Orientalism

Unlike the Americans, the French and 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 Said, Orientalism, pp. 1-2

Yet none of this Orient is merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles [. . .] It will be clear to the reader [...] that by Orientalism I mean several things, all of them, in my opinion, interdependent. The most readily accepted designation for Orientalism is an academic one, and indeed the label still serves in a number of academic institutions. [. . .] Said, Orientalism, p. 2

Related to this academic tradition […] is a more general meaning for Orientalism. Orientalism is a style of thought based upon ontological and epistemological distinction made between "the Orient" and (most of the time) "the Occident." Thus a very large mass of writers, among who are poet, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, "mind," destiny, and so on [. . . ] the phenomenon of Orientalism as I study it here deals principally, not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient . . despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a "real" Orient. (2-3,5)

Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it.,describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short. Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. […] My contention is that without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage - and even produce-the Orient politically, socio­ logically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period. […] [This book] tries to show that European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self. (Orientalism, p. 3)

To speak of Orientalism therefore is to speak mainly, although not exclusively, of a British and French cultural enterprise, a project whose dimensions take in such disparate realms as the imagination itself, the whole of India and the Levant, the Biblical texts and the Biblical lands, the spice trade, colonial armies and a long tradition of colonial administrators, a formidable scholarly corpus […] a complex array of “Oriental” ideas (Oriental despotism, Oriental splendor, cruelty, sensuality), many Eastern sects, philosophies, and wisdoms domesticated for local European use – the list can be extended more or less indefinitely. Said, Orientalism, p. 4

The Orientalism of British Romantic literature

has roots in the first decade of the eighteenth

century, with the earliest translations of The Arabian Nights into English (from a version in

French).

‘Romantic Orientalism: Overview’

Sani ol-Molk (1814-1866) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

“Our lives are ceaselessly intertwined with narrative, with the sto- ries that we tell and hear told, those we dream or imagine or would like to tell, all of which are reworked in that story of our own lives that we narrate to ourselves in an episodic, sometimes semiconscious, but virtually uninterrupted monologue.” Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, Mass-London: Harvard University Press, 1992 (1984)), p. 3.

-  A Persian work Hazar Afsana (A Thousand Legends); -  10° century: Arabic translation called The Thousand

Tales or The Thousand Nights) – both versions now lost. -  13° century: the ‘original version’ of Alf layla wa layla is

written down in Syria or Egypt; -  Later copied down in the blueprint for subsequent

copies, 4 of which preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (14th century):

-  Antoine Galland: first European translation of the Nights, in twelve volumes (1704-1717);

-  1706-08: first English translation from the French. -  1721: Twelfth volume published in English; -  By 1800, over 80 different collections were existent

Alf layla wa layla changed the world on a scale unrivalled by any other literary text. Over a period of some three hundred years following its translation into French, a chain of editions, compilations, translations, variations, and derivations circled the globe. The vertiginously unstable text emerged from the Arab heartland of today’s Syria and Iraq, and helped to inspire literary and ultimately cultural revolutions among the rising European powers. Via the networks of global imperial power, it was sent back out into what would become the Third World, where it would interact with the burgeoning literary cultures of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, eventually to return— altered beyond recognition—to the Arab world, where it today continues to inspire a new generation of Arab writers, from Morocco and Algeria to Lebanon, Palestine, and Saudi Arabia. S. Makdisi, F. Nussbaum eds., Introduction, The Arabian Nights in Historical Context (Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 1

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Maria Edgeworth, ‘Murad the Unlucky’ Popular Tales, 1804

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William Wordsworth, The Prelude Book V, ‘On Books’ (1799, 1805, 1850)

The Prelude was composed over a period of some forty years in different versions, none of which was published during the poet’s lifetime. It came to life out of a germ, an untitled sketch of a hundred and fifty lines, which was known for its 1798 incipit «Was it for this...?» (later shortened by criticism as the acronym WIFT): a suspended, cryptic question. By 1799 it had developed into two books, or Parts; it then expanded enormously into the thirteen books of the 1805 text, to amount, after further elaboration, to fourteen books in the 1850 version, which was published only after Wordsworth’s death. The Prelude constitutes therefore a sort of palimpsest, made up of various manuscripts, none of which was submitted for publication by the author: a work in search of a final shape for its readership and undergoing continuous reconfiguration. Alessandro Serpieri, ‘Secret Epiphanies in Wordsworth’s Prelude’, in Poetic and Dramatic Forms in British Romanticism, ed. F. Dellarosa, Bari-Roma: Laterza – University Press Online, 2006, p. 175.

� � � � � � � � � � �� �� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �� �� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �� � � � � � �� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �� � � � �

In the various texts, Wordsworth maps out an autobiographical itinerary, from childhood to full youth, which he continuously modifies, through additions, displaced sequences and reformulations, both in content and form, culminating in a work of extremely modern experimentation. He writes about himself, re-reads and re-writes himself, unveiling and hiding himself. He questions his own past, openly or secretly, through amplification or ellipsis, substitutions or cuttings. The reader’s task is to find his or her way in this dimension of multiple textuality, and choose which version to privilege as reference text – or, without decidedly opting for one text, how to read the palimpsest, which contains a variegated representation of young Wordsworth as narrative subject. Serpieri, ‘Secret Epiphanies in Wordsworth’s Prelude’, pp. 175-76.

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