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Closed to Oriental Heroines: Ethos of the Colonial Text

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2016

Hager Ben Driss*
Affiliation:
Kairouan University, Tunisia

Extract

The publication of Edward Said's seminal investigation of Orientalism as a discursive construction of the Other has triggered an interrogative move towards a re-reading of Western representations of Eastern peoples and geographies. Almost forlorn now is the practice of reading literary productions within an exclusively aesthetic framework of poetic tradition. Anything one writes is already a production – a representation marked by what Derrida calls “violence of the letter.” It is a violence “of difference, of classification, and of the system of appellations” (1976, p. 110).

Type
Essays
Copyright
Copyright © Middle East Studies Association of North America 2003

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