E-C-303 American Literature

Assignment Paper: - E-C-303 American  Literature

Topic                     : - Various themes in “The Scarlet Letter”

Student’s name     : - Makwana Jayshri D.

Roll  no                 :- 14

URL                      :-makwanajayshri261011.blogspot.com

Semester               :- 3

Batch                    :- 2010-11

                                                 

                                   Submitted to,

                                                 Dr. Dilip Barad

                                                 Department of English

                                                 Bhavnagar University.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Introduction:-

              Nathaniel Hawthorn is a novelist and story writer, a central figure in the American Rnaississance.His best known works include,

The Scarlet Letter (1850)

The House of the seven Gables (1851)

             Like Edgar Allan Poe, Hawthorne took a dark view of human nature.Not to be deficient in this particular, the author has provided himself with a moral, the truth, namely that the wrong doing of one generation lives into the successive ones. Nathaniel Hawthorn’s The Scarlet Letter is famous for presenting some of the greatest interpretive difficulties in all of American Literature. While not recognized by Hawthorne himself as his most important work, the novel is regarded not only as his greatest accomplishment, but frequently as the greatest novel in American literary history. After it was published in 1850, critics hailed it as initiating a distinctive American literary tradition. Ironically, it is a novel in which, in terms of action, almost nothing happens. Hawthorne's emotional, psychological drama revolves around Hester Prynne, who is convicted of adultery in colonial Boston by the civil and Puritan authorities. She is condemned to wear the scarlet letter "A" on her chest as a permanent sign of her sin. The narrative describes the effort to resolve the torment suffered by Hester and her co-adulterer, the minister Arthur Dimmesdale, in the years after their affair. In fact, the story excludes even the representation of the passionate moment which enables the entire novel.

                        Hawthorne was masterful in the use of symbolism, and the scarlet letter "A" stands as his most potent symbol, around which interpretations of the novel revolve. At one interpretive pole the "A" stands for adultery and sin, and the novel is the story of individual punishment and reconciliation. At another pole it stands for America and allegory, and the story suggests national sin and its human cost. Yet possibly the most convincing reading, taking account of all others, sees the "A" as a symbol of ambiguity, the very fact of multiple interpretations and the difficulty of achieving consensus.

                      

Themes:-

Sin, Knowledge, and the Human Condition:-

                       Sin and knowledge are linked in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Bible begins with the story of Adam and Eve, who were expelled from the Garden of Eden for eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. As a result of their knowledge, Adam and Eve are made aware of their humanness, that which separates them from the divine and from other creatures. Once expelled from the Garden of Eden, they are forced to toil and to procreate—two “labors” that seem to define the human condition. The experience of Hester and Dimmesdale recalls the story of Adam and Eve because, in both cases, sin results in expulsion and suffering. But it also results in knowledge—specifically, in knowledge of what it means to be human. For Hester, the scarlet letter functions as “her passport into regions where other women dared not tread,” leading her to “speculate” about her society and herself more “boldly” than anyone else in New England. As for Dimmesdale, the “burden” of his sin gives him “sympathies so intimate with the sinful brotherhood of mankind, so that his heart vibrate[s] in unison with theirs.” His eloquent and powerful sermons derive from this sense of empathy. Hester and Dimmesdale contemplate their own sinfulness on a daily basis and try to reconcile it with their lived experiences. The Puritan elders, on the other hand, insist on seeing earthly experience as merely an obstacle on the path to heaven. Thus, they view sin as a threat to the community that should be punished and suppressed. Their answer to Hester’s sin is to ostracize her. Yet, Puritan society is stagnant, while Hester and Dimmesdale’s experience shows that a state of sinfulness can lead to personal growth, sympathy, and understanding of others. Paradoxically, these qualities are shown to be incompatible with a state of purity.     

The Nature of Evil:-

                  The characters in the novel frequently debate the identity of the “Black Man,” the embodiment of evil. Over the course of the novel, the “Black Man” is associated with Dimmesdale, Chillingworth, and Mistress Hibbins, and little Pearl is thought by some to be the Devil’s child. The characters also try to root out the causes of evil: did Chillingworth’s selfishness in marrying Hester force her to the “evil” she committed in Dimmesdale’s arms? Is Hester and Dimmesdale’s deed responsible for Chillingworth’s transformation into a malevolent being? This confusion over the nature and causes of evil reveals the problems with the Puritan conception of sin. The book argues that true evil arises from the close relationship between hate and love. As the narrator points out in the novel’s concluding chapter, both emotions depend upon “a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent . . . upon another.” Evil is not found in Hester and Dimmesdale’s lovemaking, nor even in the cruel ignorance of the Puritan fathers. Evil, in its most poisonous form, is found in the carefully plotted and precisely aimed revenge of Chillingworth, whose love has been perverted. Perhaps Pearl is not entirely wrong when she thinks Dimmesdale is the “Black Man,” because her father, too, has perverted his love. Dimmesdale, who should love Pearl, will not even publicly acknowledge her. His cruel denial of love to his own child may be seen as further perpetrating evil.

Identity and Society:-     

                         After Hester is publicly shamed and forced by the people of Boston to wear a badge of humiliation, her unwillingness to leave the town may seem puzzling. She is not physically imprisoned, and leaving the Massachusetts Bay Colony would allow her to remove the scarlet letter and resume a normal life. Surprisingly, Hester reacts with dismay when Chillingworth tells her that the town fathers are considering letting her remove the letter. Hester’s behavior is premised on her desire to determine her own identity rather than to allow others to determine it for her. To her, running away or removing the letter would be an acknowledgment of society’s power over her: she would be admitting that the letter is a mark of shame and something from which she desires to escape. Instead, Hester stays, refiguring the scarlet letter as a symbol of her own experiences and character. Her past sin is a part of who she is; to pretend that it never happened would mean denying a part of herself. Thus, Hester very determinedly integrates her sin into her life.     Dimmesdale also struggles against a socially determined identity. As the community’s minister, he is more symbol than human being. Except for Chillingworth, those around the minister willfully ignore his obvious anguish, misinterpreting it as holiness. Unfortunately, Dimmesdale never fully recognizes the truth of what Hester has learned: that individuality and strength are gained by quiet self-assertion and by a reconfiguration, not a rejection, of one’s assigned identity.

Past and present:-    

                       The clash of past and present is explored in various ways. For example, the character of the old General, whose heroic qualities include a distinguished name, perseverance, integrity, compassion, and moral inner strength, is said to be "the soul and spirit of New Englandhardihood". Sometimes he presides over the Custom House run by corrupt public servants, who skip work to sleep, allow or overlook smuggling, and are supervised by an inspector with "no power of thought, nor depth of feeling, no troublesome sensibilities", who is honest enough but without a spiritual compass.^[5]      Hawthorne himself had ambivalent feelings about the role of his ancestors in his life. In his autobiographical sketch, Hawthorne described his ancestors as "dim and dusky", "grave, bearded, sable-cloaked, and steel crowned", "bitter persecutors" whose "better deeds" would be diminished by their bad ones. There can be little doubt of Hawthorne's disdain for the stern morality and rigidity of the Puritans, and he imagined his predecessors' disdainful view of him: unsuccessful in their eyes, worthless and disgraceful. "A writer of story books!" But even as he disagrees with his ancestors' viewpoint, he also feels an instinctual connection to them and, more importantly, a "sense of place" in Salem. Their blood remains in his veins, but their intolerance and lack of humanity becomes the subject of his novel.^[5]

Civilization Versus the Wilderness:-

                     In The Scarlet Letter, the town and the surrounding forest represent opposing behavioral systems. The town represents civilization, a rule-bound space where everything one does is on display and where transgressions are quickly punished. The forest, on the other hand, is a space of natural rather than human authority. In the forest, society’s rules do not apply, and alternate identities can be assumed. While this allows for misbehavior— Mistress Hibbins’s midnight rides, for example—it also permits greater honesty and an escape from the repression of Boston. When Hester and Dimmesdale meet in the woods, for a few moments, they become happy young lovers once again. Hester’s cottage, which, significantly, is located on the outskirts of town and at the edge of the forest, embodies both orders. It is her place of exile, which ties it to the authoritarian town, but because it lies apart from the settlement, it is a place where she can create for herself a life of relative peace.

Night Versus Day:-

                   By emphasizing the alternation between sunlight and darkness, the novel organizes the plot’s events into two categories: those which are socially acceptable, and those which must take place covertly. Daylight exposes an individual’s activities and makes him or her vulnerable to punishment. Night, on the other hand, conceals and enables activities that would not be possible or tolerated during the day—for instance, Dimmesdale’s encounter with Hester and Pearl on the scaffold. These notions of visibility versus concealment are linked to two of the book’s larger themes—the themes of inner versus socially assigned identity and of outer appearances versus internal states. Night is the time when inner natures can manifest themselves. During the day, interiority is once again hidden from public view, and secrets remain secrets.

Public Guilt vs. Private Guilt

                     Perhaps the foremost purpose of The Scarlet Letter is to illustrate the difference between shaming someone in public and allowing him or her to suffer the consequences of an unjust act privately. According to the legal statutes at the time and the prevailing sentiment of keeping in accordance with a strict interpretation of the Bible, adultery was a capital sin that required the execution of both adulterer and adulteress--or at the very least, severe public corporal punishment. Indeed, even if the husband wanted to keep his wife alive after she committed adultery, the law insisted that she would have to die for it. It is in this environment that Hester commits adultery with Dimmesdale, but we come to see that the public shaming cannot begin to account for all the complexities of the illicit relationship--or the context of it. What Hawthorne sets out to portray, then, is how the private thoughts, the private torture and guilt and emotional destruction of the people involved in the affair, are more than enough punishment for the crime. We wonder whether the state or society has any right to impose law in private matters between citizens. Does adultery really have no impact upon the lives of others? If not, it should not be seen as a crime against the village. A more charitable reading of the Bible would come later in reflections on the New Testament interpretation of adultery law, namely, that the public need not step in to punish a crime when we ourselves have our own sins to be judged. Each person suffers enough already for his or her own sins.

Punishment vs. Forgiveness

                   One of the more compelling themes of the novel is embodied by Chillingworth, who seems the arbiter of moral judgment in the story, since Dimmesdale--the minister and the supposed purveyor of righteousness--is himself tainted as a party to the crime. Chillingworth is surprisingly forgiving of Hester's crime. We sense that he understands why she would forsake him. After all, he is deformed, he is older, he has not been nearby, while she is beautiful and passionate. Indeed, we get the feeling that Chillingworth's self-loathing allows him to forgive Hester, but this attribute also increases the relentlessness and rage with which he goes after Dimmesdale. In Dimmesdale, he sees the vigor and passion which Hester desires and which he himself does not possess. Like a leech, he's out to suck Dimmesdale of his life force, not just to punish the minister for the crime of fornicating with his wife, but also to symbolically appropriate Dimmesdale's virility. And as the novel continues, Chillingworth seems to grow stronger while Dimmesdale seems to weaken. That pattern continues until Dimmesdale dies in an act of defiance, his public demonstration of guilt, which essentially leaves Chillingworth stripped bare of his power to punish or forgive.

E-C-301 The Modernist Literature

Assignment Paper: - E-C-301 The Modernist Literature

Topic                     : - Art of characterization

Student’s name     : - Makwana Jayshri D.

Roll  no                 :- 14

URL                      :-makwanajayshri261011.blogspot.com

Semester               :- 3

Batch                    :- 2010-11

                                                 

                                   Submitted to,

                                                 Dr. Dilip Barad

                                                 Department of English

                                                 Bhavnagar University.

 

Virginia Woolf: Art of Characterization:

          Virginia Woolf is a great creative artist, in the sense that her works introduce us to a unique and living imaginative world, like all other artist she also wanted to paint a picture of real life as she saw it. She had her own vision of life and wanted to convey it through her novels. She found that the conventional novel imposed order upon experience, an order which did not correspond with reality.

Break from Technique:

          Mrs. Woolf belongs to the school of “stream of consciousness” novelists she is one of those great English novelists of the 20^th century who had the courage to break free from tradition, and then she does not give us merely the externals of character, but renders the very souls of her personage with created a number of memorable, many-sided and sounded figure, which are among the immortals of literature. Her fiction is a well-stored picture-gallery of vivid and memorable men and woman.

The stream of consciousness technique:

                 Virginia Woolf is not one of the architects of the “Stream of consciousness novel”, she is not its originator, but it is in her novels that “the stream of consciousness” technique finds its balance. She has succeeded in imposing from and order on the chaos inherent in the novel of subjectivity.

                  Woolf’s characters are to give a new direction, a new form and a new spiritual awareness of the English novel. She began writing in the established tradition of the novel; her first two novels,

    The Voyage Out

    Night and Day

                     Are largely traditional but soon she realized the inadequacy of the traditional novel,and adopted the stream of consciousness technique in the Jacob’s Room, her third novel. Her art rapidly matured and her next two novels

    Mrs. Dalloway

    To the Lighthouse

                   Represent the very consummation of the novel of subjectivity. This explains her break with traditions and conventions of the 19^th century novel.

 The Technique of “The Interior Monologue”:

          Human life as it really is was her theme, and nothing else was of an interest to her she reveals the vey springs of action, the hidden motives which impel men and women to act in a particular way. This is done by a clever use of the ‘interior monologue’ or ‘the stream of consciousness technique she takes us directly into the minds of her character, and shows the chaotic flow of ideas, sensations and impressions, and in this way she brings us closer to their psyche, than can ever be possible by the use of conventional methods of characterization.

    Art of Characterization

    Conventional technique:

          E.M. Foster and other critics have expressed the view that Mrs. Woolf fails to provide in her novels memorable gallery of portrait of such as we get in the works of other novelists. Her characters, it has been said, do not live long in the mind and are soon forgotten. The fact is that there are characters in her novels, vivid and conventional and so must not be judged, by the older convention which Mrs. Woolf rejected. Conventionally, ever since the time of Fielding, novelists have adopted two methods of character drawing. First, they have sketched their characters through set description. We are told directly what a character looks like, how he dresses up, what are his oddities, and what are the silent qualities of his head and heart.

          Secondly, characters have been visualized and made real through own words and actions, as well as through what other have to say about them. However, Mrs. Woolf regarded such methods of characterization as superficial. In this way, we get the externals of characters and not the inner reality. Her purpose was to render in her novels the soul or ‘psyche’ of her dramatis nonsense and with this end in view she adopted a new technique of characterization.

    Her Range: It’s Limitation.

       Hoe ever, like all other novelists; Mrs. Woolf can communicate the experience of only a limited number of human types. Her range of characterization is limited for her central characters she limits herself to one large social class- those who have large incomes or earn salaries. Her chief characters are all drawn from the upper middle class. She herself belonged to this class and so had intimate. First knowledge of it. Mrs. Ramsay and their circle all belong to this class. Round these central figures, she creates the poor Londoners like Mrs. Macnab and Mrs.Bast. but such characters also are drawn with the same sureness of touch. When she moves outside this circle, her vision diminishes, and she points with less sureness of touch.

     For example,

                She knew very little about shopkeepers, traders and merchants, therefore, towards them her attitude is often patronizing and snobbish. They are used merely as ministers to the men and women of her limited world, the upper-middle class world, the world of those who earn salaries of have private incomes and live sheltered lives. Not knowing those below the “middle class”, she can not depict convincingly the “lower order” There are no such characters in “To the Lighthouse”.

    The multiple point of view:

Personality is revealed by inner monologue the novelist uses the stream of consciousness technique for the purpose.

“There is continual shifting from mind to mind, so that we as often perceive the impression given by one to another  the experience each receives.”

Also certain scenes and moments are selected which throw a character into high relief, the scene in the children’s bedroom in To the Lighthouse, for example, which highlights at once Mrs. Ramsay’s tact and motherly love, sympathy and understanding. Mrs. Ramsay emerges as a fully rounded character because we know her as she is reflected in several others. Further, we share the memories of divorce people regarding her at a number of crucial memories in her life. We know her as she is today and she was in the past, and also know the various factors which have influenced her soul and determined her character or predisposition to act in a particular manner. We have been a peep into her soul, and come to know her more intimately than would ever have been possible by the use of conventional methods. We know her by the roots, so to say. We know her not only through her conscious acts and words, but also through what passes within her at the sub-conscious level, and also through the stream of consciousness of a number of other characters.

Similarly, the stream of consciousness technique has been used with equal effect to render the soul or psyche of Mr. Ramsay. We first know her through the stream of consciousness of his wife, and then through that of William Bankes. Further light is thrown upon his character by the hostility which he raises in the minds of his children. James and Cam in particular. In this way his personality is built up. His character has been further realized by his habit of reciting lines of poetry to dramatize his sense of loneliness and desolation. This is one of the finest examples of the way in which Mrs. Woolf can realize a character with perfect economy. The novelists’ purpose was to convey how life fells to those who live it, to convey, in other words, the actual sensation of living and suffering, and she has fully succeeded in doing so. Indeed, as far as the richness and variety of characterization is concerned, To the Lighthouse is the finest of the novels of Virginia Woolf.

    Her female character:

          Mrs. Woolf was a woman and quite naturally it is to be expected that her greatest triumphes would be achieved in painting female characters. She does succeed in rendering the essential quality of female experience where it differs from the male, she, of course, notes the wavering, uncertain nature of the dividing line, and she also sees the qualities of each sex appearing in the other.

“But she discerns more clearly, perhaps, than any other novelist, the peculiar nature of typically feminine modes of thought and apprehension, and their peculiar value as the complement of masculine modes.”

Women in her novels, women who are clearly distinguished from each other, share this essential womanliness. Thus Mrs. Ramsay, Lily Briscoe, Sally Seton, Mrs. Dalloway, Doris Kilman and Elizabeth are all sharply distinguished from each other, but all have this essential womanliness. For example, Mrs. Ramsay has this womanliness. One of the factors in this essential feminity is the incapacity of these women far retaining or distinguishing between far retaining or distinguishing between facts. Thus Mrs. Ramsay does not understand what Charles Tansley is studying. She simply says that his dissertation is about ‘the influence of someone on somebody’. Can have no idea of the four sides of the copass. Tansley speaks for the novelist herself when he says,

                               “Women can’t paint”

                               Women can’t write.”

                There is certain vagueness, certain muddle- headedness about their minds: they are all indifferent to fact. But even then her women are complements to her men-folk. This is so because they have a special honesty, honesty which comes of self-knowledge, and the power of distinguishing the essential from the accidental and non-accidental men and women are essentially different, but if there is love between them, the differences between their respective natures contribution to make a single whole, as if together they made up a human being more complete than either. Thus Mrs. Ramsay and Mr. Ramsay are the natural complements of each other, together enjoying a fuller life than would have been possible far them separately. 

E-E-305 Post Colonial Literature

Assignment Paper: - E-E-305 Post Colonial Literature

Topic                     : - Introduction to “Orientalism”

Student’s name     : - Makwana Jayshri D.

Roll  no                 :- 14

URL                      :-makwanajayshri261011.blogspot.com

Semester               :- 3

Batch                    :- 2010-11

                                                 

                                   Submitted to,

                                                 Dr. Dilip Barad

                                                 Department of English

                                                 Bhavnagar University.

 

Introduction:-   

                       A central idea of Orientalism is that Western knowledge about the East is not generated from facts or reality, but from preconceived archetypes that envision all "Eastern" societies as fundamentally similar to one another, and fundamentally dissimilar to "Western" societies. This discourse establishes "the East" as antithetical to "the West". Such Eastern knowledge is constructed with literary texts and historical records that often are of limited understanding of the facts of life in the Middle East. Orientalism by Edward Said is a canonical text of cultural studies in which he has challenged the concept of orientalism or the difference between east and west, as he puts it. He says that with the start of European colonization the Europeans came in contact with the lesser developed countries of the east. They found their civilization and culture very exotic, and established the science of orientalism, which was the study of the Orientals or the people from these exotic civilizations. Edward Said argues that the Europeans divided the world into two parts; the east and the west or the occident and the orient or the civilized and the uncivilized. This was totally an artificial boundary; and it was laid on the basis of the concept of them and us or theirs and ours. “Oriental” was simply understood as the opposite of “occidental” (western). The word was used to develop negative connotations after the publication of the work Orientalism by the American-Palestinian scholar Edward Said. Following the ideas of Michel Foucault, Said emphasized the relationship between power and knowledge in scholarly and popular thinking. In particular, Said says that without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period (p. 3).

In the part I of his introduction, Said puts several definitions of “Orientalism”. Some of these are:

       “A way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on Orient’s special place in European Western experience” (p. 1).

       “A style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident’” (p. 2).

       More historically and materially defined, Orientalism is “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (p. 3). Said gives limitation in his work, that Orientalism derives from a particular closeness experienced between Britain and France and the Orient, which until the early years of the nineteenth century had really meant only India and the Bible lands. America also has dominated the Orient since World War II. British, French, or American come the large body of texts Said calls Orientalist (p. 4).

In part II, In this chapter, Edward Said explains how the science of orientalism developed and how the orientals started considering the Orientals as non-human beings. The Orientals divided the world in to two parts by using the concept of ours and theirs. An imaginary geographical line was drawn between what was ours and what was theirs. The orients were regarded as uncivilized people; and the westerns said that since they were the refined race it was their duty to civilize these people and in order to achieve their goal, they had to colonize and rule the orients. They said that the orients themselves were incapable of running their own government. The Europeans also thought that they had the right to represent the orientals in the west all by themselves. The most important use of orientalism to the Europeans was that they defined themselves by defining the orientals. For example, qualities such as lazy, irrational, uncivilized, crudeness were related to the orientals, and automatically the Europeans became active, rational, civilized, sophisticated. Thus, in order to achieve this goal, it was very necessary for the orientalists to generalize the culture of the orients.   

Said stresses particularly on the Orient as an idea that has history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West. Then, he gives three qualifications to someone who deals with Orientalism.

First of all, it would be wrong to conclude that the Orient was essentially an idea, or a creation with no corresponding reality. The phenomenon of Orientalism deals principally with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient beyond any correspondence with a real Orient (p. 5).

Second, the ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood without their force or their configuration of power. The relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, and of varying degrees of a complex hegemony (p. 5).

Third, one has never to assume that the structure of Orientalism is nothing more that a structure of lies or myths which would simply blow away. It is particularly valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient than it is as a verdict discourse about the Orient (p. 6).

Another justification the Europeans gave to their colonization was that they were meant to rule the Orientals since they have developed sooner than the Orientals as a nation, which shows that they were biologically superior, and secondly it were the Europeans who discovered the orients not the orients who discovered the Europeans. Darwin’s theories were put forward to justify their superiority, biologically by the Europeans. In this chapter, Edward Said also explains how the two most renowned orientalists of the 19^th century, namely Silvestre de Sacy and Ernest Renan worked and gave orientalism a new dimension. In fact, Edward Said compliments the contribution made by Sacy in the field. He says that Sacy organized the whole thing by arranging the information in such a way that it was also useful for the future orientalists. And secondly, the prejudice that was inherited by every orientalist was considerably low in him. On the other hand, Renan who took advantage of Sacy’s work was as biased as any previous orientalists. He believed that the science of orientalism and the science of philology have a very important relation; and after Renan this idea was given a lot attention and many future orientalists worked of in its line.

In the part III, avoiding from an inaccuracy produced by too dogmatic generality as well as too positivistic focus, Said deals with three main aspects of his contemporary reality to point the way out of the methodological difficulties as the followings:

1.     The distinction between pure and political knowledge.  Most knowledge produced in the contemporary West is that it be non-political, scholarly, academic, impartial, or small minded doctrinal belief. However, in practice, the reality is more problematic since no one has ever devised a method for detaching the scholar for the circumstance of life, from the fact of his involvement with a class, a set of belief, or a social position. Therefore, Orientalism is not merely political subject, nor a large collection of texts about the Orient, nor representative of some nefarious “Western” imperialist plot to hold down the “Oriental” world. It is a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts. It is an elaboration of a basic geographical distinction and a whole series of interests as scholarly discovery. It is a discourse corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power (p.12) 

2. The methodological question.

                     Much of what Said does in his study is to describe both the historical authority in and the personal authorities of Orientalism. His principal methodological devises for studying authority are what can be called strategic location, a way of describing the author’s position in text regard to the Oriental materials he writes about, and strategic formation, a way of analyzing the relationship between texts and a way in which groups, types, genres of texts acquire mass and referential power among themselves.

3. The personal dimension. 

                      Much of the personal investment of this study derives from Said’s awareness of being an “Oriental” as a child growing up in two British colonies. All of his education in Palestine and Egypt, and in the United States has been Western and that deep early awareness persisted.