Word: schwab
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...story of Schwab's work and career is itself one of rediscovery. Poet, biographer, novelist, editor, translator, and scholar, Raymond Schwab (1884-1956) was an impressive homme de letters little known outside his native France, mainly due to his untranslated works. Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking's timely translation of La Renaissance Orientale comes nearly 35 years after being overlooked following its original publication in 1950. Currently considered to be the apogee of Schwab's career, it represents an invaluable legacy to Orientalism, a field popularized in the '50s by Edward Said, who wrote Schwab's foreward...
...some senses, The Oriental Renaissance betrays its own antiquity. Schwab's sprawling intertextual odyssey aims at an epic global vision reconciling East and West. He confesses, quoting Walt Whitman's "A Passage to India": "And I myself did not anticipate... that I would discover Whitman's line 'Thou roundness of the world at last accomplished.'" The irony of that world come full circle is that the term "Oriental" itself has evolved; no longer in its current use does it describe the "Oriental" of Schwab's time. Orientalism, for Schwab, mainly concerns Sanskrit studies which have since been canonized into...
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...
STILL, THE ORIENTAL RENAISSANCE is disappointing in that, while looking East, it fails in some senses to look fare enough East Schwab limits his horizons primarily to India, glancing to the Far East only brietly in his mention of the Abbe Remusat's pioneering of Chinese studies at the College de France: "It is high time we recognize that everything depended on India," he claims...