問題詳情

IV. Reading Comprehension (20%; 2% each)Passage 1: # 41-46In 1978 Edward W. Said, a Palestinian musicologist, journalist, and cultural criticliving in America, published Orientalism, a revisionist study of the academic disciplineby the same name, thereby revolutionizing how we view textual representations ofother cultures and helping to shape postcolonial studies.The Orient (the term Said uses for the middle East and the Indian subcontinenttogether, though he limits his discussion to British and French representations of theMiddle East) is geographically and historically a rival, an ancestor, and therefore theantithesis of the “West,” which, as contact and material exchange between the twoincreased during the Middle Ages, was absorbed as a concept to become afundamental part of the Western outlook, allowing the latter to ‘orientate” itself. Thebranch of knowledge, at first a disparate collection of artistic representations of theEast, crystallized into the academic discipline of Orientalism during the 19th century.Said thus dissociates from any reality of the Eastern world. It is instead a type ofcultural apparatus developed to uphold this conception of a binary oppositionbetween cultures—and therefore an imperialist ideological project, given that, at thetime, Britain and France were extending their sway over the regions in question. (TheUnited States is argued to have developed its own branch in the 20th century from FarEastern parameters).The features of this discursive paradigm are that it is constructed; that it isirrelevant to any notion of the real-life Orient: that it enforces, through stereotypingand distortion, the “pattern of relative strength” vis-à-vis West and colonized East;that it therefore tells us more about the ideological mechanics of “European Atlanticpower over the Orient” than about the reality of the meeting cultures; and thatOrientalism, for the best part of 150 years feted as a systematic academic field builton research, should be seen as a discourse—nothing so definite as a model orimpetus for action, because it is built on generalizations—shaped by socially basedforms of power. This is the kernel of Said’s argument, which he then expands throughan elegant and sweeping series of chapters on 18th and 19th century classics ofOrientalist scholarship.
41. Which of the following statements about Edward Said is INCORRECT?
(A) He was a Palestinian.
(B) His book Orientalism is considered a ground-breaking work.
(C) He was a renowned historian.
(D) He was primarily concerned with cross-cultural issues.

參考答案

答案：C
難度：非常困難0
統計：A(0),B(0),C(1),D(0),E(0)

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