Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

225As for the emperor himself, he saw the Orient only as ithad been encoded first by classical texts and then byOrientalist experts, whose vision, based on classical texts,seemed a useful substitute for any actual encounter withthe Real Orient. ( Said, Orientalism 80)It is the excess in the Idea which explains the lack in theconcept. (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 220)Many critics have worked on the Americanness and greatness of American literature.Ideological critiques of nineteenth-century American literature have focused on the Americancontext, on the struggle for democracy in America. An example is David S. Reynolds’ Beneaththe American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melvillewhich is an excellent contextualization and ideological critique of this historical canon. However,very little has been said about the “non-American” subtexts of American classic literature. Earlydiscussions of classic American literature, influenced by F.O. Matthiessen and Newton Arvin,tended to focus primarily on thematic interpretations of the American literary canon and toneglect the interdisciplinary nature of nineteenth-century American literature. More recently,critics like Herschel Parker, Andrew Delbanco, Sharon Cameron, and Robert K. Martin sought touncover certain historical and gender realities in the nineteenth-century American literaryarchive. My dissatisfaction with the limits of the thematic study of literature led me to probefurther into the connection between American literature and other cultures, between the Occidentand the Orient, between the literary and the non-literary. John T. Irwin’s American