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Taking Edward Said’s seminal work Orientalism (1978) as a starting point, this lecture focuses on Western conceptions of the ’Orient’ from the early modern age to the present day. Students will be acquainted with manifestations of Orientalism in different literary genres (travel literature, prose fiction and drama), in the fine arts (from British and French book illustrations and 18th-century portraits of British aristocratic travellers to the French Orientalist painters of the 19th century) and in film, in order to develop an understanding of how this multi-faceted discourse emerged and evolved across the centuries.
The lecture will not attempt to outline a complete history of Orientalism. Instead, it focuses on core texts and on selected protagonists of of (British) Orientalism (including Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Richard Francis Burton and T. E. Lawrence), who represent different perspectives, each in turn shaped by historical, social and gender-specific contexts.
A number of excerpts from Said’s Orientalism, critical responses to Said by Reina Lewis, Sara Mills, Meyda Yeğenoğlu, Dennis Porter and Aijaz Ahmad as well as excerpts from further texts and images will be made available to students via a Moodle course during the semester. |
