Topic: Critical analysis of “Orientalism”
Name: Nasim Gaha
Roll: 22
Email id: gahanasim786@gmail.com
Enrolment no: 2069108420190014
Sem-3
Submitted to Department of English MKUBU.
About Edward Said
Born in Palestine in 1935, Said was educated first in Jerusalem and Cairo and then at Princeton and Harvard. He joined the faculty at Columbia University as a professor of English and comparative literature in 1981 where he continued to research, write and teach until his death in 2003.
About Edward Said; Orientalism
"Orientalism” is a way of seeing that imagines, emphasizes, exaggerates and distorts differences of Arab peoples and cultures as compared to that of Europe and the U.S. It often involves seeing Arab culture as exotic, backward, uncivilized, and at times dangerous. Edward W. Said, in his groundbreaking book, Orientalism, defined it as the acceptance in the West of “the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, ‘mind,’ destiny and so on.”According to Said, Orientalism dates from the period of European Enlightenment and colonization of the Arab World. Orientalism provided a rationalization for European colonialism based on a self-serving history in which “the West” constructed “the East” as extremely different and inferior, and therefore in need of Western intervention or “rescue
The “East” as differentiated from the “West”, which includes the Middle East, Near East, Central Asia, South Asia and the Far East, is today top of mind with news breaking in a stream of anxiety, fear, economic and political pressures, social conflict, unrest and war. When one does a WorldCat.Org search for the keyword “Orientalism” one is presented with over 16,000 entries, including over 7,000 peer-reviewed articles. A Google search returns over 870,000 listings. Clearly, Edward Said hit a worldwide nerve when he published Orientalism in 1979. Said opens by defining Orientalism as three interdependent ideas. First he states, “The most readily accepted designation for Orientalism is an academic one … Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient – and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist … is an Orientalist, and what he or she does is Orientalism.” Second, “Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and (most of the time) “the Occident.” Here he presents a key duopolistic theme repeated and expanded upon throughout the book. Said’s third meaning, “Which is something more historically and materially defined than either of the other two. … 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.” And with this third definition, Said references Michel Foucault’s ideas about discourse as a source of power, and how one can reveal the hierarchies of power structures through the analysis of texts. Knowledge is power, or if you’d rather, texualized discourse is power. Said proceeds to outline his methodology for the book and adds a personal dimension, ending with a resonate statement, calling out his own secular humanism, “If this stimulates a new kind of dealing with the Orient, indeed if it eliminates the “Orient” and “Occidental” altogether, then we shall have advanced a little in the process of what Raymond Williams has called the “unlearning” of “the inherent dominative mode.” This aspiration desire that people can and should work to obliterate (or eliminate) the duopolistic and negative results of seeing the world as East or West, European or Asiatic, Oriental or Occidental, ‘us’ or ‘them’, is reiterated throughout Said’s text. It is a fundamentally important point that one should keep in mind while reading his analysis, since it is a hopeful consideration that mitigates some of his harsher social criticisms.
Thornton Wilder is considered one of America's most important authors, although The Matchmaker is not generally thought of as one of his most important works. Taken as an evening's entertainment, the play has always been well respected by critics. Negative views have only come when critics have thought the work of such an important author should do more.
Wilder's place in American literature is secure, if only because he is the only writer to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction (for The Bridge of San Luis Rey) and drama (for both Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth). Overall, his reputation as a dramatist has held up better than that as a novelist.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey is still required reading in literature classes, but it is seldom read outside of schools, and his other novels have disappeared. Our Town, on the other hand, remains one of the most enduring and most frequently performed works in America, performed by over four hundred amateur groups each year. Wilder's first critical and popular success came with The Bridge of San Luis Rey in 1927. Not only did it win the Pulitzer, but it sold millions of copies. Just three years later, though, a critical backlash began with a 1930 article by Michael Gold for the New Republic and a second article he wrote later that year for New Masses, in which he said, "Yes, Wilder writes perfect English. But he has nothing to say in that perfect English. He is a beautiful, rouged, well-dressed corpse, lying among the sacred candles and lilies of the past, sure to stink if exposed to the sunlight." His criticism struck a chord with other reviewers, who began taking Wilder to task for his failure to address complex social problems. As Jackson Bryer explained the critics' complaints in his essay commemorating Wilder's one-hundredth birthday, "What these critics were saying was that Wilder was not sufficiently attuned to the problems of his day, that by setting his novels in remote times and places, he was ignoring the present." Bryer went on to explain that it had to be that way. Unlike other major writers of the day, such as Faulkner or Hemingway, Wilder grew up in different places on different continents, and so he had no place that he could feel deep in his heart was his own. It was natural for him to set his fictions in different times and places, even though some critics took this as a sign of aloofness. The most obvious distancing mechanism is the surly personality of the play's main character, Horace Vandergelder. Certainly, there are elements to his character that anyone can relate to, but just as certainly there are not people coming away from the theater telling themselves, "He's like me." He is a curmudgeon, a crank, and a tightwad, too money conscious to recognize true love and too stingy to let his employees have one evening off out of the week. He distrusts the young, but he also has no respect for the law. He parts with cash sparingly, a few dollars here and there, but he carries a huge amount in his purse, which he is surprisingly careless enough to lose. In short, he is a compilation of unpleasant human traits, which would make him a fine secondary character. As the lead, he serves to remind audiences of the extremist nature of comic characters. Putting Horace Vandergelder in the middle of the play is like focusing a movie camera so tightly on a science fiction monster that a zipper in the back of the suit eventually shows.
Because Wilder had, by the time The Matchmaker was produced, won two Pulitzers and established himself as a fixture of the American literary scene, reviewers had to lower their expectations in order to think of the play in the right sense. As Rex Burbank was to put it in his overview of Wilder's career in 1961, "There is less claim to serious attention and contemplation in this play than in any of Wilder's other full-length works; and it should be enjoyed for what it is—a farce." The lack of social insight that became a rallying cry against Wilder in the 1930s helps readers understand the spirit of The Matchmaker, according to Burbank: "one enjoys laughing at Vandergelder's absurdities but is not constrained to give much thought to their social or ethical significance."
