Word: oriented
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...TIME WHEN East Asian Studies, sushi bars, and visas to China are becoming increasingly trendy items, there reappears on the literary horizon an important and previously "lost" work whose intellectual voyage takes one back to the origins of the West's Oriental fascination. Raymond Schwab's book is a major critical undertaking whose ambitious task is reinterpreting a self-conscious moment crucial in the development of contemporary western civilization and thought. Quoting Friedrich Schlegel's quest, "we must seek the Supreme Romanticism in the Orient," Schwab's original hypothesis attempts, with compelling evidence, to trace 19th century Europe's Romantic...
Said notes in the foreward that one could better describe Schwab as an "Oreinteur" than an "Orientalist," Indeed Schwab's intimate style maintains a respectful appreciation for his subject, the Orient, of which he remarked himself. "Perhaps no single other term has been so loaded with emotion, even passion" in the history of western consciousness. His philosophical critique not only traces changing perceptions of the Orient, the Other, but in the process goes to the roots of western intellectual history to illuminate changes in the Occidental self-image as well...
India is privileged as the Orient to pose "the great question of the Different." For Schwab, India, and not Eqypt, was the first and essential Oriental influence to inspire the mental displacement. Schwab calls "totally erroneous" the popular assumption that the deciphering of hieroglyphics represented the critical breakthrough, attributing the traditional "prejudice" surrounding Champollion's famous discovery to glamorizing myth. Instead, he explores at length the Occidental fascination with "the Hindu soul... something like a separate sex." Schwab's retrospective vision is itself a richly dense landscape with illuminating details such as Shelley's "pantheism" and Leibnitz's "Oriental lobe...
...quest for authenticity, Schwab is uncompromising in his attack on shallow Oriental exoticism. He reveals his anti-aesthetic bias against the French Romantics, toward whom his brilliant criticism is considerably less kind. He denounces their tendency toward "formal creation." The chapter, "An Extended Orient: Exoticism" criticizes at length the borrowing of imagery by the French as sheer indulgence. Gautier's Avatar is dismissed as the work of an exploitive dilettante with a "strikingly apparent gift for painting generalized pictures." Similarly, Hugo's Orientales is dismissed as "meager picturesque Orient imposed upon Montparnasse landscape...
Although teams from the Orient have traditionally considered the Dragon Race a serious one, Radcliffe crew members--who have no experience with Far Eastern rowing--say they'll take it more lightly. "It's an entirely different kind of boat which is one reason why it is more low key," said Lightweight Captain Nina Streeter, a senior. "It's very amusing to watch...