Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

246Aeschylus to Marx for its Orientalist ideas, he adopts the same discourse of humanism in thename of Vico as an ideal intellectual.In Orientalism Said observes that the “knowledge of the Orient, because generated out ofstrength, in a sense creates the Orient, the Oriental, and his world” (40). This knowledge,however, is associated with the concept of lack which will legitimize the American militarypresence in the Middle East. It should be noted, at this point, that the dynamics of the less (lack)forays into the economy of the more (excess). Said has not considered the importance of readingthe Oriental Hieroglyphics in generating a colonial discourse. His claim that “Americans will notfeel quite the same about the Orient, which for them is much more likely to be associated verydifferently with the Far East” (Orientalism 1) fails its own criteria when we take into account theactual American military presence in the Middle East (as the image of excess and abundance).The Orient, however, is of a vital importance to the Americans. Nineteenth-century terracing andexotic journeys are now replaced with military and economic presence in the Orient. In this logic,the excessive proximity to/of the Other brings about not so much the reversal of lack into excessas the inextricable interrelation of hermeneutics and imperialism.For its critical, paradoxical drive, its emphasis on the pervasiveness of the missedencounter between the Orient and the Occident, Said’s Orientalism appears astonishingly usefulto the study of classic American literature, at the same time it studies how every nation constructsits own Orient. America, like all the other Western colonial empires, has its own Orient.However, it is important to notice that the nineteenth century witnessed a shift in the perceptionof imperialism; the century brought a new paradigm in which imperialism and colonialism areclothed in the discourses of nationalism, modernization, and progress. Accordingly, we have