Orientalism
Edward Said
Random House 1978
From The Post-Colonial Studies Reader
Edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Triffin
Routledge, NY and London @1995

ON 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 Orient of Chateaubriand and Nerval’ (Desjardins 1976: 14). He was right about the place, of course, especially so far as a European was concerned. The Orient was almost a European invention, and 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 was over. Perhaps it seemed irrelevant that Orientals themselves had something at stake in the process, that even in the time of Chateaubriand and Nerval Orientals had lived there, and that now it was they who were suffering; the main thing for the European visitor was a European representation of the Orient and its contemporary fate, both of which had a privileged communal signifi­cance for the journalist and his French readers... .



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http://www.trickster.org/basilica/said1.htm

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http://www.elsj.org/kanto/orientalism.htm

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Subject ellipsis is one of the characteristics
of informal English. The investigation
of subject ellipsis in corpora thus reveals
an abundance of pragmatic and extralinguistic
information associated with
subject ellipsis that enhances natural language
understanding. In essence, the
presence of subject ellipsis conveys an
‘informal’ conversation involving 1) an
informal ‘Topic’ as well as familiar/close
‘Participants’, 2) specific ‘Connotations’
that are different from the corresponding
full sentences: interruptive (ending discourse
coherence), polite, intimate,
friendly, and less determinate implicatures.
This paper also construes linguistic
environments that trigger the use of subject
ellipsis and resolve subject ellipsi
http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/W/W06/W06-3501.pdf

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it means
أن ظاهرة التخاطب العقلي المسبق قد تكون تماما مشابه لم يحدث واقعيا قيما بعد


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Note added at 44 mins (2007-10-14 23:14:02 GMT)
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لهذا كانت التشبيه الدقيق بين ما كتبة الصحفي وماكان يدور بخلده أنذاك

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Perhaps it seemed irrelevant that Orientals themselves had something at stake in the process, that even in the time of Chateaubriand and Nerval Orientals had lived there, and that now it was they who were suffering; the main thing for the European visitor was a European representation of the Orient and its contemporary fate, both of which had a privileged communal significance for the journalist and his French readers.
Americans will not feel quite the same about the Orient, which for them is much more likely to be associated very differently with the Far East (China and Japan, mainly). Unlike the Americans, the French and the British—less so the Germans,

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and ckech here also
I WANT TO THINK about Orientalism and some of its prehistories and alternative archaeologies by focusing attention on questions of time and the experience of time. I suggest that such questions interrupt the tendency to treat Orientalism primarily in terms of space, of East and West as simply spatial categories, by necessarily entailing ideas about history and historical development. As an object of knowledge for the West, the East seems to have been, from the start, a site of origins, a place with an important past but a troubling present. Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) opens by evoking the figure of nostalgia in recalling how a French journalist, reporting from Beirut after the civil war of 1975-1976, "wrote regretfully of the gutted downtown area that 'it had once seemed to belong to ... the Orient of Chateaubriand and Nerval." (1) For Said, the Orientalist chronotope is necessarily "backwardness," since the idea of Eastern backwardness follows directly from European ideas of "positional superiority" that have permeated Western thought "from the late Renaissance to the present." (2) In assigning the East to the past, Orientalism operates chronotopically, telling a story about time. Orientalism is also constituted by a formalized array of chronotopical elements that might well occur within systems of signification otherwise unrelated to Orientalism: nostalgia, for instance. Chronotopes both embody and convey some instantly recognizable or at least seemingly transparent sets of attitudes about another time by linking that time with a place. As such, they provide rhetorical ways of using temporality to provide at once a measure of both spatial difference and spatial distance.

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وهذا قول معارض لهذه الفكرة
بقوله ان ذلك اسقاطات من الحركة الفكرية الأوروبية

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http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2220/is_3_46/ai_n1576...