A Study Of Said's Orientalism From The Perspective Of Discourse

Edward W·Said is one of the greatest literary and cultural critics during literary history of the twentieth century in the west,even in the world. Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism play essential keywords.Because of the complexity of Said's thoughts and diversity of the awareness of the researchers, the study and comments on Said presents interdisciplinary in nature including pure literary studies, social and political criticism, reflection on cultural history, research from the postcolonial perspective, linguistic analysis, psychological analysis and studies of women's awareness. However, there are few researches based on the concrete and systematic study on Said's Orientalism from the perspective of discourse or about some features and the significance of Said's Orientalism in the theory of discourse. Although many scholars have noticed the importance of discourse analysis of Said's Orientalism, there are rare specific and in-depth interpretations of it and the results of its system's research have not yet come into being.The dissertation concentrates on Said's Orientalism from the perspective of the discourse based on the existing research and reflection of various questions. In the study, the author applies the "secular" methods of text analysis advocated by Said and studies the works of Orientalism scope including different times, different authors and different fields. Foucault's discourse theory and Gramsc's hegemony are the basic theories for this dissertation.This thesis studies the topic "how Said applies discourse theory to the research of Orientalism " focusing on the characterization of Orientalist discourse, the production and operation of Orientalism, the discourse resistance to the Orientalism and summing up the characteristics and value of Said's Orientalism so as to let readers have a comprehensive and profound understanding of it.The paper is divided into four chapters in addition to introduction and conclusion:The first chapter introduces the theory of discourse. As a conceptual term, discourse appears in the field of linguistics at first, referring to the overall language with a series of consecutive words or sentences. However, Said points out clearly that his study of Orientalism has been carried out under the influence of Foucault and stresses the impact of ideology. This chapter mainly sorts out the Foucault's theory of discourse and Gramsc's hegemony, then carries on the theoretical analysis of Said's Orientalism.The second chapter explores the characterization of Orientalist discourse. Orientalism is not the real objective "Oriental" show, but the interpretation of the discourse in the system of "Western" subordered to "Eastern". This thesis focuses on the oriental discourse from "Otherness" of speech and the speech characteristics, specifically showing how the East is made to say in a form and manner lwith text analysis of horizontal comparison, longitudinal analysis, literary texts, professional academic, political and other fields..The third chapter deals with the production and operation mechanism of the Orientalism. In the development of history, the Orient'otherness'can only be permanently frozen to a sidekick, an imaginary region, an area between discourse and power by the Western or Orientalist so that Orientalism becomes a set of fixed discourse. This chapter focuses on the research of "Orientalism is a kind of image representation " and "Orientalism is a system of hegemonic ideology", revealing the power everywhere of Orientalist discourse with theoretical explanation, specific analysis, whole and case analysis.The fourth chapter studies the resistance of Orientalist discourse because Said fully understands importance of cultural non-violent revolution in the forms of spirit and applies Gramsci's Cultural Revolution theory to the problem of national analysis, forming his cultural ideology of decolonization and cultural resistance.It is then concluded that Said's Orientalism not only makes a critical comment on the traditonal Orientalism, but also reveals the inter-relantionship among discourse, knowledge and power. Said's Orientalism successfully pioneers a road to cultural criticism and provides a new angle and criteria for reconsideration of Chinese traditional culture, of relationship between China and western countries, and of Chinese literature study.