Unit 4: Introduction to ethnic and postcolonial

studies

Chinua Achebe, John Hillis Miller, Edward Said

LITERARY TEXT: “HEART OF DARKNESS”

1.- CONTEXT

Joseph Conrad was a poet born on Poland but in 1886 was granted the British
nationality. Although he had always considered himself a polish, he wrote in English. He
is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in English.
Conrad worked for the “Societé Anonyme du Haunt-Congo” in 1890 and the witnessed
colonialist corruption and exploitation of natives. In this trip along the Congo River he
became a disabused (disillusioned) men (like Marlow).

Heart of Darkness was first published in 1889 as “The Heart of Darkness” when it was
serialised (presented in episodes) in the Blackwood Magazine. In 1902 published in book
form as “Heart of Darkness” (along with other two short stories). It is a critique of
European imperialism and colonialism based on his own personal knowledge of the
situation in Belgian Congo, where the central narration is set.

Queen Victoria´s diamond jubilee (bodas de diamante) in 1897: it prompted a

general exaltation of the British Empire, the imperial idea and Great Britain´s role as a
world power extending civilisation on the colonised territories.
At the time Heart of Darkness was written, the British Empire was at its peak, and
Britain controlled colonies and dependencies all over the planet.

2.- FORM AND CONTENT

• Heart of Darkness is a novella that belongs to the fiction or narrative genres.

• It’s a modernist text: it challenges many of the conventions of the 19th century
realist novel and short story.
• Its main feature = EXPERIMENTATION
❖ The use of different narrators (with different points of view)
❖ The use of defamiliarization in the description and narration and the
deferral of meaning of many Marlow´s observations (he describes sth or
sb imperfectly and later in the narration it becomes clearer and his
opinions about it are expressed)
❖ Symbolic and allegorical style and content
 ❖ Inexplicable and inexpressible mystery that contributes to the vagueness
of the meaning of Marlow´s experience in Africa
❖ The uncertainty about what Kurtz did, his symbolism as a character
(Kurtz= “short” in German); the paradoxical nature of the attraction he
exerts on Marlow and his being “hollow” (empty inside, artificial,
insincere); the difficulty in knowing what he represents in the “elusive
(escurridizo) “core” of the novel”

• Different narrators (with different points of view); there is a narrator behind a

narrator
• He uses the pronoun “YOU” to refer the group on the boat (including Marlow
himself), his friends on the Nellie (Thames) as he tells them the narration and
the readers (involving them in his thoughts...)

On HoD there is a constant use of imagery (dark, gloomy, threatening images...)

• DEFAMILIARIZATION: he uses this in the sense of describing something or

someone imperfectly as he did not know but he later sees the light and expresses
his opinion
• BINARY OPPOSITION: the Africans are sometimes the only ones described as
“aliens” but some other times the “Western” people are the so-called aliens.
• ALLEGORIES and METAPHORS: the book is full of them “these were strong,
lusty, red-eyed devils” ...
• CONTRASTS: darkness/ illumination, enlightment ⇒ Marlow wants to show
himself as a Buddha in enlighten his friends about the horrors of colonialism in
Africa, in order to get rid of the negative karma and liberate himself from the
attachment to this world.
• ANTITHESIS: Thames and the Congo River

The main theme of HoD is the exploitation of Africa and Africans by white
colonialism and imperialism, and the degeneration, inhumanity, and general
corruption of whites by carrying out this exploitation unrestrained by any of the moral and
legal limitations established in Europe.
Other themes are
• Untrustworthiness of appearances
• The nature of truth
• The moral/spiritual journey of Marlow
• The lack of humanity towards other humans

• The terms “negro”, “nigger” used in the text are offensive nowadays but were
descriptive at that time (as a reference to race). So, they do not reflect a racist
consideration for Africans.
 • “Nigger” became a derogatory noun while “negro” remained neutral, along with
“coloured.
• Then, “negro”, “nigger”, “coloured”, “of colour” = rejected by Civil Right
campaigners (struggle for Civil Rights): no longer acceptable: taboo words that
must be avoided.
• “Black” is generally accepted as a descriptive adj., but sometime avoided.
• “Afro-American”: a politically correct alternative
3.- COMMENT ON THE FOLLOWING EXTRACTS

• Fancy sth: want • Yell: scream • Cursing; curse: maldecir,

• Accursed: maldito
• Subdued: sumiso
• Anguish: angustia
• Toil: hard work, effort
increpar
• A Whirl: tumult
• Unearthy: fantasmal,
• Limb: extremidades del cuerpo sobrenatural
• Foliage: leaves, greenery (ramaje) • Kinship: parentesco
• Frenzy: histeria, furor • Uproar: alboroto

3.1.1- Description of the place and the people who inhabit it

A place removed from Western notions of civilisation: is prehistoric and like the night
of the first ages. The inhabitants seem hardly human or rational beings – they yell,
move in a whirl of black limbs and express themselves through an incomprehensible
frenzy; Marlow calls one of them prehistoric man and feels he is about to enter a
madhouse. The place is described as accursed and he and the crew feel appalled
(shocked) by their surroundings and its inhabitants. The language is overwhelmingly
negative, revealing the explorers-exploiters fear and mistrust of the physical and human
environment.
The narrator underlines the ALIEN nature of the country and its inhabitants to the eyes
of white men (ALIEN meaning “other”, “strange”, “foreign”). A place the reader would not
like to visit, the impossible communication with the Africans is threatening to create a
conflict out of fear felt in both sides.
3.1.2.- Is it a racist text? Comparisons, binary oppositions

• All the parts of this excerpt = comparison between Europeans and Africans
• Terms like “remote”, “too far” ... underline THE DISTANCE; THE DIFFERENCE in
cultural evolution
• However, the comparison in this part establishes likeness: it emphasises their
common humanity and the excitement provoked by accepting it despite cultural
differences.
• Marlow use “you” to refer the group on the boat, including himself. In this “you” are
also included his friends on the Nellie (Thames) as he is telling them the narration,
and also the readers = we are involved in these thoughts and it makes us think about
our common humanity with Africans.
• In the 1st paragraph: a binary opposition between the explorers and the natives
(the Other of Europeans)
• We can invert the relationship: Europeans as the negative Other to Africans (the
“invading aliens” who do not belong to Africa)
We can break the following part into 3 sections:

In previous lines:
✓ Discourse of colonialism is present “taking possessions”, “to be subdued” ...
Africans described as a mass of limbs (not as individuals); “a black and
incomprehensible frenzy” ...
 ✓ Africans identified as “The prehistoric man” = linked with the landscape
becoming “a prehistoric earth” (pointing to a difference in time and cultural
evolution).
But now:

− No reference to race.
− Enumeration of the Africans actions = they are possible meanings of their
movements, shouts... but they are meanings that Europeans cannot identify
because they lack the necessary knowledge “We were cut off from the
comprehension of our surroundings”
− They do not belong there: here the Europeans are identified as the other.
o In the 2nd section there are two comparisons
1. Europeans to phantoms: Marlow changes the point of view, he sees the
Europeans as Africans probably would: like ghosts, spirits
2. Europeans shocked sane men watching crazy people; as not understanding what
they see. It introduces an essential difference between Africans – Europeans.
Racism= essentialist position considering a race essentially inferior than another
one. Binary opposition (Africans mad/ Europeans- sane): Africans –the negative
element.
o In the last part:
❖ Difference of historical and cultural evolution (not race). Africans (prehistoric
stage) / Europeans (more advanced culturally and materially): here the Africans
are not characterised by the negative element of the binary opposition. It is the
Europeans= they cannot “remember” = their culture works like an impediment to
understand the Africans.
❖ They seem to be dead, ghosts (their failure of communication, inaction...)
These comparisons; binary oppositions balance each other and show that the text is
not racist.
 3.2.1.- Descriptions
✓ Words like “death”, “decay”, “decomposition”, “weakness”, “futility” ... =
negative picture of the Company´s station
✓ “Depiction (depict: represent, describe) of machinery”: it points to the corruption
and chaos of colonialism
On the paragraphs:
1) Description that underlines the mismanagement of the Company and its
irrational actions: not taken care equipment, upside down, railway-truck,
rusting and decaying equipment; the absurdity of blasting (blow up) with
explosives a cliff that was not an obstacle to the railway line.

2) Marlow describes the Africans ⇒ they are dehumanised, reduced to

slavery, as if they were animals. The description shows that they are bad
treated, enslaved... The detail of the loincloth (taparrabos) = dehumanises them:
“the short ends behind waggled to and fro like tails”. Marlow describes what he
sees.
Next lines = they are treated unjustly: “but these men could by no stretch of the
imagination be called enemies. They were called criminals...” = here he empathizes
with the Africans (how all must be incomprehensible to them) and makes the
(Western) reader change the POV = again DEFAMILIARISATION, to see the
phenomenon of colonisation from an unfamiliar POV.
This description shows slavery without naming it. It shows the effect of colonisation
(dehumanisation, weakening) on the Congolense, not Marlow´s racism (he later
ironizes about colonialism and expresses his reaction: he was appalled-shocked).
“Outraged (indignado) law”: ironic and sarcastic. If Africans couldn´t be identified as
enemies, the “law” of whites cannot be “outraged”: it is an unjust law.
Their thinness, their efforts, difficult breathing, their “deathlike indifference of
unhappy savages” = description that makes us think of ourselves as witnesses.
Africans identified as “raw matter” (=material prima) ⇒ metaphor, it is a product now
and Marlow empathises with the guard (the overseer=supervisor): he understands
his fears, his prudence. He read his body language and what it means. He is afraid
of white men. He inverts the common racist observation that blacks all look the same
= all the white men look alike. Again, it makes the reader change its point of view.
The African guard understands that Marlow isn’t dangerous “and with a large, white,
rascally grin, and a glance at his charge, seemed to take me into partnership in
his exalted trust”. “Rascally” (malvado) referring to moral is linked to “white”
(grin=teeth): indicating the negative consequences of colonisation.
By focusing on the whiteness of his smile and its rascality (maldad), Marlow
associates whiteness with immorality and makes the African guard somebody who
has been corrupted by white colonialism. Conrad intends to make readers consider
different points of view and realise its effects and condemn it.

3) Marlow explains his friends how he felt “My idea was to let the chain-gang
get out of sight before I climbed the hill. You know I´m not particularly tender...”
The kind of life he has chosen is a mistake: “such sort of life as I had blundered
into”.
“These were strong, lusty, red-eyed devils that swayed and drove men –men I tell
you”: emphasising the power of these devils. The “devil” was of a different kind: it
was “flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly”: a more
dangerous “devil” because he worked more subtly, and the consequences were
negative. In our Western imagination devils are linked with “darkness” = this is
relevant to the meaning of the whole novella.
The “devils” = a way of allegorising the human vices of violence, greed (gula,
avaricia), and hot desire, which come to control even mentally strong men. “the
flabby (fat), pretending, weak-eyed devil of rapacious (greedy = codicioso) and
pitiless folly (disparate)”. It is a vice that dominates the whole enterprise of the
Company and whose worst example is Kurtz.

4) What this incident meant for Marlow; how he connects this with his experience
of meeting Kurtz: “How insidious he could be, too, I was only to find out several
months later and a thousand miles farther” (the “devil” is the one that
“possessed” Kurtz). Marlow is shocked: “For a moment I stood appalled, as
though by a warning”.
By the end of this excerpt Marlow has shed (abandoned) his detached voice and
he condemns the colonial enterprise, identified now with sth devil-like. This
metaphorical devil is not an African religious element, but a Western element =
inversion related to the darkness: the destructive effects of colonialism.
 4.- TEXT ANALYSIS

• I had to look after the savage: paternalistic figure

• Specimen: as if he was a plant, an animal… as a sort of less human figure
• Improved specimen (because he can fire up a boiler (he can use western
equipment)
• As seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat: a comparison, a
simile = the native is compared to a dog: he looks ridiculous, like a dog in a circus.
• A few months of training (how to use the boiler) had done for that really fine
chap (guy).
• He is identified as a fine chap: this is ironic and patronising (condescending; treat
with an apparent kindness which betrays a feeling of superiority)
• “And he had filed teeth too… and three ornamental scars on each of his
cheeks”: it is a description which focuses on the native aspects of the African
man, on his physical characteristics... to a western reader the African seems
ridiculous.
• He ought to have been clapping his hands and stamping his feet on the
bank: a commentary made by Marlow on Western influences on Africans. It
seems like Marlow is patronising again, diminishing the importance of this African
native...
• But what follows: instead of which he was hard at work, a thrall (=slave) to
strange
• WHICHCRAFT: trying to discover how the boiler works, so Marlow is assuming
the viewpoint of the native. Full of improving knowledge: an ironic commentary
(is not really an improving knowledge; he doesn’t know using the steam)
• He was useful because he had been instructed: in that ironic commentary
about how, he has been instructed there is also a negative commentary on what
Westerns are doing in Africa. They are not really improving anyone, they are
exploiting the natives.
• Marlow changes his outlook at the end of the fragment: “but the sangs were
thick, the water was treacherous and shallow, the boiler seemed indeed to have
 a sulky devil in it, and thus neither that fireman nor i had any time to peer into our
creepy thoughts”.
• At the beginning of the text there is a distance between the native and Marlow. At
the end there is a closer relationship. Marlow adopts his point of view. “The boiler
seemed indeed to have a sulky devil in it”. Both are afraid of the boiler (it can
explode). Both are linked by those creepy thoughts, their fear. There is an
identification between them. There is a common humanity between them. This is
material to think that there is not racist attitude.
• Depending on which point of view we are asked to adopt, we have to focus
on the aspects that suggest the text is racist or the aspects that suggest
just the opposite.

CRITICAL AND LITERARY THEORY: “POSTCOLONIAL CRITICISM”

1.- BACKGROUND
Postcolonial criticism emerged as a distinct category only in the 1990s. It gained currency
through the influence of such books as In Other Worlds (Gayatri Spivak, 1987).
One significant effect of postcolonial criticism is to further undermine the universalist
claims once made on behalf of literature by liberal humanist critics. To judge all literature
by a single, supposedly ‘universal’, standard. This universalism is rejected by
postcolonial criticism; whenever a universal signification is claimed for a work, then,
white. Eurocentric norms and practices are being promoted, and all others
correspondingly relegated to
subsidiary, marginalised roles.
The ancestry of postcolonial criticism can be traces to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of
the Earth (1961) and voicing what might be called ‘cultural resistance’ to Frances’
African empire. Fanon argued that the first step to ‘colonialised’ people in finding a voice
and an identity is to reclaim their own past; then the second is to begin to erode the
colonialist ideology.
Hence, another major book, which can be said to inaugurate postcolonial criticism
proper, is Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), which is a specific exposé of the
Eurocentric universalism which takes for granted both the superiority of what is
European or Western, and the inferiority of what is not. Said identifies a European
cultural tradition of ‘Orientalism’, which is a particular and long-standing way of
identifying the East as ‘Other’ and inferior to the West. The Orient, the East becomes
the projection of those aspects of themselves which Westerners do not choose to
acknowledge. At the same time, the East is seen as fascinating realm of the exotic, the
mystical and the seductive. It also tends to be seen as homogenous. Their emotions and
reactions are always determined by racial considerations rather than by aspects of
individual status or circumstances.

2.- POSTCOLONIAL READING

 Postcolonial writers evoke or create a precolonial version of their own nation,

rejecting the modern and the contemporary, which is tainted with the colonial
status of their countries. An awareness of representations of the non-
European as exotic or immoral ‘Other’.
  Some postcolonial writers have concluded that the colonisers’ language is
permanently tainted, and that to write in it involves a crucial acquiescence in
colonial structures
 Emphasis on identity as doubled, or hybrid, or unstable. Chinua Achebe
publishing his first novel, Things Fall Apart, was criticised by an early reviewer
for affecting to identify with African villagers when his university education and
his broadcasting job in the capital city of Lagos should make him identify with the
values of ‘civilisation’.
 Stress on ‘cross-cultural’ interactions → phases of colonial literature
1) ‘Adopt’: they begin with an unquestioning acceptance of the authority of
European models and with the ambition of writing works that will be
masterpieces entirely in this tradition. Since the writer’s ambition is to adopt
the form as it stands, the assumption being that it has universal validity.
2) ‘Adapt’: since it aims to adapt the European form to African subject matter,
thus assuming partial rights of intervention in the genre.
3) ‘Adept’: in the final phase there is a declaration of cultural independence
whereby African writers remake the form to their own specification, without
reference to European norms. Since its characteristic is the assumption that
the colonial writer is an independent ‘adept’ in the form, not a humble
apprentice.
This notion of the double or fluid identity explains the great attraction which post-
structuralism and deconstruction have proved to be for the postcolonial critic.
Post-structuralism is centrally concerned to show the fluid and unstable nature of
personal and gender identity, the shifting, ‘polyvalent’, contradictory currents of
signification within texts, and the way literature itself is a site on which ideological
struggles are acted out. This post-structuralist perspective is seen in the work of
such representative figures as Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabah.
Edward Said, who is less overtly theoretical, seems to accept some of the premises of
liberal humanism.
The three stages mentioned earlier provide a way of seeing postcolonial literature,
they closely parallel the development stages of feminist criticism:
❖ In it is earliest phase, postcolonial criticism took as its main subject matter white
representations of colonial countries and criticized these for their limitations and
their bias → This corresponds to the early 1970s phase of feminist criticism when
the subject matter was the representation of women by male novelists.

❖ The second phase of postcolonial criticism involved a turn towards

explorations of themselves and their society by postcolonial writers. At this
stage the celebration and exploration of diversity, hybridity, and difference
become central. This is the stage when, in the title of the well-known pioneering
work in this field, ‘the empire writes back’ → This corresponds to the ‘gynotext’
phase of feminist criticism, when there is a turn towards the exploration of female
experience and identities in books by women.

2.- WHAT POSTCOLONIAL CRITICS DO

1. They reject the claims to universalism made on behalf of canonical Western
literature and seek to show its limitations of outlook, especially its general inability
to empathise across boundaries of cultural and ethnic difference.
 2. They examine the representation of other cultures in literature as a way of
achieving this end
3. They show how such literature is often evasively and crucially silent on matter
concerned with colonisation and imperialism
4. They foreground questions of cultural difference and diversity and examine their
treatment in relevant literary works.
5. They celebrate hybridity and ‘cultural polyvalency’, the situation whereby
individuals and groups belong simultaneously to more than one culture.
6. They develop a perspective, not just applicable to postcolonial literatures,
whereby states marginality, plurality and perceived ‘Otherness’ are seen as
sources of energy and potential change.

CRITICAL AUTHORS
1.- CHINUA ACHEBE
❖ Extract from ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’
(1975, revised 1977,1978).
❖ The role of the narrators in Heart of Darkness: According to Achebe, Conrad
tries to insulate himself from ‘the moral universe’ of his novel by creating not one,
but two narrators. Achebe declares the attempt to create a cordon sanitaire
(‘sanity barrier’) between Conrad and his two narrators to be a failure, since there
is no third or ‘alternative’ narrator (or frame of reference) that would enable the
reader to judge the characters.
❖ “That Western desire and need” (p.2): refers to the need of West to use the
(negative, remote...) African continent to emphasise its own “state of grace” (its
positive qualities: civilisation, culture, power...)
❖ The relation of the author (Conrad) to his fictional narrators (p. 14): Conrad
tries to in insulate (aislar) himself from “the moral universe” of his novel by
creating not one but two narrators. There is an attempt to create a cordon
sanitaire (“Sanitary barrier” in French) between Conrad and his two narrators: a
failure, since there is no third or “alternative” narrator (or frame of reference) that
would enable the reader to judge the characters.
❖ Achebe argues that what is wrong with Conrad’s portrayal of Africans is that it
is not a portrayal of Africans at all, but a place ‘which eliminates the African as
human factor’.

2.- JOHN HILLIS MILLER

▪ Extract from ‘Should We Read Heart of Darkness?’ (2002)

 Eurocentric: this term was coined by Egyptian Marxist economist Samir Amin
un 1988; literally it means ‘centred on Europe’, i.e. considering the world, history,
social phenomena, and cultural aspects such as literature form a European point
of view, especially reflecting a white, male, heterosexual and metropolitan or
colonizer outlook.
 Parabasis: presentation of ideas by an imaginary character (what the narrators
say does not represent Conrad´s ideas)
  Apocalypse: a literary genre that involves a revelation that is not clear or a
series of revelations in which the last one is not revealed= the ultimate meaning
of the literary text is uncertain, vague, unspecific...
 Irony, two types are mentioned (in all cases there may be an element of the
absurd and the paradoxical):
➢ Rhetorical figure in which the meaning is contrary to the words
➢ Irony is elusive (imprecise): a discrepancy between the words and their
meaning, or between actions and their results, or between appearance
and reality
 Prosopopoeia (personification or allegory): the idea or concept is represented as
a human figure with different attributes
 Leitmotif: a recurrent (repetitive) element in a literary text (prosopopoeias and
catachresis) are recurrent through the text
 Mimetic: that the text aims at representing reality faithfully
 Eschatological: theological term related to eschatology (studies theories about the
last events in the history of the world or humankind or the beliefs concerning the end
of the world, the second coming of Christ...). Miller uses this term because of its
relationship with the future and its usual obscurity as another way to insist on the
never fulfilled promise of illumination
 Messianic: from “messia”: the promised and future saviour (Salvador) of the Jews
(Judíos); Christ a universal saviour to Christians. Negative meaning: religious
fanaticism.
 Teleological: that something (a text...) shows an intention. He contrasts
“eschatological” and “messianic” to “teleological”; “H. Of Darkness” has no
intentional definite meaning (conceived by the author), the meaning remains
indefinite.

To Miller a “STRONG READING” or “A READING IN THE STRONG SENSE” (par. 1)

involves not just reading superficially but analysing and interpreting the text and showing
that the reader has been changed by the experience of the text.
Like Rolland Barthes´s ideas on the role of the reader and what she/he is supposed to
do with a text (in “The death of the author”). The reader is free to interpret what the
revelation of “Heart of Darkness” is, but he/she should try to engage in unravelling
(desenredar) the complexities of the text.

It’s a literary text; he warns against reading it as different from literature

Formal aspects that identify the text as literature (binary opposition: literature vs.
journalism, history):
a) The use of imagery narrators that do not represent the author
b) The tissue of figures and rhetorical devices (Similes that work like a veil hiding
something invisible in the text, and thus makes of the text an “apocalypse” or
an example of “apocalypse” genre)
c) The use of irony in the text and its undecidable nature
 d) Prosopopoeias or personification of the “it” or “darkness” that Marlow
encounters in Africa, personified in the natives, but especially embodied in
Kurtz.
By identifying the distinctive literary features (absent in other modes of writing) he
follows a structuralist strategy (they create systems based on binary oppositions
according to distinctive features that characterise or not elements in that system). But
his essay has some characteristics related to post-structuralism and Derrida´s
deconstruction

Without mentioning his name; Achebe is included among those critics who say “H. Of
Darkness” is racist, sexist or both (as it can be read in Achebe´s essay).

He suggests that Achebe reads “H. Of Darkness” as a mimetic text that reflects Conrad´s
experiences in Africa and his opinions about Africa and Africans, ... but the novella must
be read as literature, interpret the “unseeable” message through the formal aspects of
the text (corruption all right, leading to torture, muss murder, rape, even cannibalism?)

Characteristics of post-structuralism and deconstruction in Miller´s reading:

✓ Attention to the formal aspects; binary opposition (literature – journalism, history)
= traditional analysis
✓ Attention to the text: “there is nothing out of the text”
✓ Lack of stable meaning of language: language is endlessly deferred
(postponed)= definition of a word leads to the use of synonyms and other words
✓ Apocalyptic deferral of meaning= “The structure of H. Of D.” =the structure of the
endlessly deferred promise”
✓ Aporias (an impasse, knot in the text we cannot unravel because what is said is
selfcontradictory): the ungraspable irony... that the possible meaning of the text
is contrary to its surface meaning, the unknowable nature of the “it” ...
✓ Quotation taken from Derrida: “The inaccessible incites from its place of hiding”:
a first clue to his critical point of view.

However (we are critical of Miller):

 Although that “darkness”, “it” is not explicitly named on interpreting

 The irony, and “darkness” and “illumination” as aporias: they are not real
impasses that cannot be disentangled: The reader has to offer his/her
disentanglement (=interpretation): very limited by the formal aspects, historical
setting, characters (especially Kurtz) ...
 He offers a reading of what that “darkness” and the “illumination” are.
 The reader is free to interpret but he limits the possibilities of interpretation and
he prescribes how to read the text (binary opposition: a correct- an incurred
reading).
 His post-structuralist strategies veil his traditional discussion of the novella and a
correction to the opinions of other critics.
 3.- EDWARD SAID
▪ Extract from ‘Orientalism’ (1978)
▪ The imaginary Orient represents one of the West’s most deep-rooted and
persistent images of the Other; the material Orient is a form of discourse supported
by institutions, language, academic study, principles, bureaucracy and a certain
way of doing things.
▪ Said assigns the following three designations or meanings to Orientalism:
1. An academic one, through its - ‘Orientalism’s- doctrines and theses about
the Orient and the Oriental.
2. The distinction between the Orient and the Occident, East and West.
3. The corporate institution or ‘Western style’ for controlling and shaping
the Orient.

 Cultural contestant: contestant is who takes part in a dispute. he means that

historically the orient has challenged or rivalled the west in cultural terms.
 Discourse: in contemporary critical theory means an instance of language that
involves the speaker/writer – subject and listener/reader –object. it may include
any form of utterance (a poem, an advertising campaign, ...) said is unequivocal
about the collusion (connivencia) of the discourse of orientalism with western
institutional power structures.
 Surrogate: substitute

To seek “contemporary alternatives” to “Orientalism” and study other cultures from a

“non-repressive and nonmanipulative perspective

He argues that society and literature should be studied together and hopes his
arguments shed light on (clarify) structures of power and domination.

These recalls (reminds of) the new historicist approach which studies literary and non-
literary text together and “focuses attention on issues of State power and how it is
maintained”.