Questão 739832

Text I

1 ____On a visit to Beirut during the terrible civil war ofOn a visit to Beirut during the terrible civil war of

1975-1976 a French journalist wrote regretfully of the gutted

downtown area that “it had once seemed to belong to the

4 Orient of Chateaubriand and Nerval”. He was right about the

place, of course, especially so far as a European was

concerned. The Orient was almost a European invention, and

7 had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings,

haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.

Now it was disappearing; in a sense it had happened, its time

10 was over.

Americans will not feel quite the same about the

Orient, which for them is much more likely to be associated

13 very differently with the Far East (China and Japan, mainly).

Unlike the Americans, the French and the British — less so the

Germans, Russians, Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, and Swiss —

16 have had a long tradition of what I shall be calling Orientalism,

a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the

Orient’s special place in European Western experience. The

19 Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of

Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of

its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one

22 of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In

addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West)

as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. The

25 Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and

culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part

culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with

28 supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery,

doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles. In

contrast, the American understanding of the Orient will seem

31 considerably less dense.

To speak of Orientalism therefore is to speak mainly,

although not exclusively, of a British and French cultural

34 enterprise, a project whose dimensions take in such disparate

realms as the imagination itself, the whole of India and the

Levant, the spice trade, colonial armies and a long tradition of

37 colonial administrators, a formidable scholarly corpus,

innumerable Oriental “experts” and “hands”, an Oriental

professorate, many Eastern sects, philosophies, and wisdoms

40 domesticated for local European use — the list can be

extended more or less indefinitely. From the beginning of the

nineteenth century until the end of World War II, France and

43 Britain dominated the Orient and Orientalism; since World

War II America has dominated the Orient, and approaches it as

France and Britain once did. Out of that closeness, whose

46 dynamic is enormously productive even if it always

demonstrates the comparatively greater strength of the

Occident (British, French, or American), comes the large body

49 of texts I call Orientalist.

E. W. Said. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978, p. 1-4 (adapted).

According to text I, decide whether the following statements are right (C) or wrong (E).

Presently, America situates itself in a different position towards the Orient, regarding British and French perspectives.