This thesis analyzes the influence of Orientalism on Turkey&rsquo / s relations with the European Union (EU) since Turkey&rsquo / s application for full membership. EU-Turkey relations are elaborated in the context of how Europe constitutes its relations with Turkey as an oriental &lsquo / other&rsquo / . Thus arguments on the role of the other in identification process, self/other conceptualization and Orientalism as an othering mechanism of the west are presented to provide a theoretical framework. The question of how Turkish-European affairs have developed since the eighteenth century is answered in order to constitute a historical background of EU-Turkey relations, adopt theories of othering and observe construction of Orientalism. Lastly the traces of Orientalism since Turkey&rsquo / s application for membership in 1987 are searched in the official documents of the EU and statements of European statesmen. Religion, culture and civilization are analyzed as differentiating factors in the hegemonic relationship between the west and the Orient, between the EU and Turkey. It will be concluded that Orientalism continues to be an influential factor in EU&rsquo / s enlargement process, specifically in Turkey&rsquo / s accession.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2008. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 366-382).

The way in which media discusses religion has changed over time. Due to the separation of state and church in 2000, the Swedish state to a lesser extent legitimizes its political ruling with references to religious concepts. As a result, a higher tolerance towards religious minorities can be said to have taken place. This is an ambiguous change however, where critique raised towards religious practices and expressions of minorities also occurs to a higher extent. The public debate is in large part conducted through the media, but is also seen to be produced and reproduced through the media’s discourse. The aim of this study is to examine the way in which Islam, and Muslims by extension, are portrayed in editorials of two of Sweden’s largest broadsheet papers, Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter. The study takes a deductive approach, and uses a qualitative text analysis with inspiration from discourse theory to examine the editorials with the help of three theories. The first one is social representations theory as applied by Birgitta Höijer to media studies, the second is Charles Taylor’s Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition, and the last is Edward Said’s Orientalism.   The analysis shows that there are indicators of orientalist manifestations in the discourse regarding Islam, and Muslims by extension. This is mainly demonstrated through emotional anchoring as well as anchoring through antinomies. The orientalist manifestations apply to Said’s first and fourth dogma, where Islam and its different expressions are perceived as being at odds with the alleged democratic society. The analysis suggests that, in their role as producers of social representations and collective cognitions, the editorials included in this study withhold recognition from Islam as a collective identity and culture.

Western scholars have long sought to grasp the essence of and explain Buddhism. Western representation of Buddhism has been in a manner that reflects their concerns and interests. In addition to this it is also known that Buddhism in Sweden is seen in a favorable way. This study tries to locate where this positive attitude toward Buddhism stems from and if it is represented in this manner in Swedish textbooks. Therefore three textbooks of upper secondary class of religion are to be examined, not only to see if there is a positive attitude towards it, but to see in what manner Buddhism is depicted in Swedish schools on the whole. To achieve this, a content analysis that contains two different methods are conducted to approach the matter. The analysis shows that the chapters which regard Buddhism is depicted in an all together favorable way, with a focus on the life of the Buddha and his discipline, the doctrine. The authors try to de-emphasize aspects of the mythical and narrative dimension which can be conceived as strange in the west. Theravada is portrayed as “pure” Buddhism. Furthermore monks are mentioned in a more comprising way in comparison to nuns. To conclude Buddhism is depicted in a manner that reflects western values and interests.

The purpose of this study on Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad is toinvestigate the various personal and socio-historical reasons for Twain's disrespectful and intolerant depiction of the people of the Middle East in juxtaposition to his lighter treatment of Europeans of the Mediterranean, whom he also wrote about at length in the same travel narrative.The research involves examining the main text, but also considers the long history of Western attitudes towards the Middle East, Twain's prejudicial upbringing, his strong penchant for exaggeration, his sense of opportunism, and the books and contemporary social attitudes that may have influenced his thinking. Research reveals an intricate web of complexity behind Mark Twain's attitude in his writing. It also reveals that the many of his critics fall prey and become entangled inthe very same web of complicated and skewing factors that trapped Twain nearly one hundred and fifty years ago.

Epic dichotomies – threat/desire, Islam/Christianity, Orient/Occident, fear/lust, self/other – have fundamentally shaped the conceptualizations, images, and imaginings of the interaction between East and West. The Holy Land was the locus of both sensations in the twelfth-century West. Islam, arisen from the Arabian Peninsula and spreading steadily, embodied the strongest threat to western Christendom that it had yet faced, both militarily and theologically. The vividly imagined “East,” particularly Jerusalem, was the locus of spiritual and material desire. These intertwined notions underlie the ideological, theological, and historical perceptions of the Crusades, in their own time as today. This project seeks to explore the dual image of the East in the twelfth-century West through the prime dichotomy that has, both historically and presently, shaped Western perceptions of the dar-al-Islam: the East as at once threat and object or source of desire. Both this dichotomy and the examinations of individual sites and objects in which it is expressed nuance and challenge earlier scholarly assertions regarding visual representations of Crusading, and posit new interpretations of iconographic traditions and their semiotic functions in the twelfth-century Aquitaine. This dissertation is arranged as a series of investigative essays into monuments and objects that express the presentation and development of these divergent ideas in the twelfth-century Aquitaine. The first half of is comprised of three interrelated examinations of material objects that illuminate Western concepts of Islam and Muslims. Various iconographic traditions, I argue, were created and modified to express the mechanisms by which Christendom attempted to define, and respond to, these evident threats to self and territory. The second half of this project focuses on the material manifestations of desire, primarily through the deployment of Orientalized architectural forms and the utilization of relics and objects related to the East. Although these trends, as my conclusion discusses, reached their true apex in the decades after the loss of Jerusalem in 1187, these early examples typify the range of cultural notions centered on the desire to possess and control the sanctity of the Holy Land. / text

This thesis studies Oscar Wilde’s encounter with the idea of China in late nineteenth century Britain. After Marcartney’s embassy to the Qing court and the two Opium Wars, “China” became an increasingly negative idea in nineteenth century Britain. Wilde’s sympathy with China under such historical circumstances induces reconsiderations of the relationship among aestheticism, orientalism, and modernism. The story of how Wilde utilized and appropriated Chinese culture is at the same time a story about how orientalism was used by British aestheticism to protest against the late Victorian middle-class ideology and invent the politics of modernist aesthetics. This thesis contributes to the study of the idea of China in nineteenth century Britain in general and to the scholarship on Oscar Wilde, aestheticism and modernism in particular. Wilde’s reading of Chuang Tzu and his appreciation of the anti-realist Chinese aesthetic and visual power embodied in patterned blue and white china helped him articulate his aestheticism. The thesis examines Chinese influence on his aesthetic, social and political ideas against British middle-class ideology. The historical contexts of Wilde’s encounter with Chinese philosophy and material culture are also scrutinized to show that China, as an exotic-familiar antithesis to British bourgeois ideology, became a critical point of reference for Wilde to launch his trenchant criticism of Western society. Works and collections by other proponents of British aestheticism, such as James McNeill Whistler and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, are also included to further demonstrate China’s role in the British Aesthetic Movement. The thesis is based on three interrelated central arguments: first, British aestheticism was a reaction to the social problems and consumer culture in late Victorian Britain, and it aims to aestheticize not only art, but also life and society; second, the nineteenth-century British construction of China, especially in the translation and deciphering of Chuang Tzu in early British sinology in Chapter one, and in Chapter Two, blue and white china’s visual anti-realism widely discussed and condemned in the late Victorian mass media, crucially participated in Wilde’s theory of art and British aestheticism in general; third, Wilde’s aestheticism, by incorporating Chinese thought and aesthetics, had experimented with modernist aesthetics before it came to be known as such. Although Wilde and other British aesthetes were complicit in the orientalist construction of China when placing China and the West into a binary position, they revised the nineteenth-century British imperial discourse that subjugated and denigrated the Orient and invested in the kind of Sino-British communication advocating and incorporating the aesthetic values of Chinese culture. / published_or_final_version / English / Master / Master of Philosophy

Denna uppsats, Den muslimska kvinnan – En diskursanalys av medias framställning av den muslimska kvinnan och slöjan, handlar om hur slöjan och den muslimska kvinnan framställs i olika morgon- och kvällstidningar. Vi har genom att använda oss av kritisk diskursanalys som metod, synliggjort vilka diskurser som skapas kring slöjan och den muslimska kvinnan. Dessa diskurser kan förankras i de negativa diskurser som finns gentemot muslimer i allmänhet. Teorierna som används i studien är postkolonial teori, orientalism och intersektionellt perspektiv, vilka ligger till grund för den analyserande delen. Analysen belyser hur den muslimska kvinnan och slöjan framställs som förtryckets symbol och främmande i den västerländska kontexten. Vi kan också se hur de diskurserna baseras på en allmänt rådande negativ attityd gentemot muslimer. Slöjan används också som en motståndsidentitet i den västerländska hegemonin, som en alternativ identitetsmarkör till det västerländska samhället.

This dissertation examines the principal Japanese translations of Arthur Waley (1889-1966): Japanese Poetry: The Uta (1919), The No Plays of Japan (1921), and The Tale of Genji (1925-33). These works have been overlooked as English literature of the British modern period, although Waley intended most of his translations to function as modern English literature. I include a short biography of Waley's formative years and maintain that aspects of his identity—Jewish, bisexual, and socialist—were important in the choice of his occupation and in the selection and interpretation of his texts. I situate Japanese culture in the context of orientalism and Anglo-Japanese political relations. Japanese culture had a role to play in Anglo-Japanese imperialisms; this is demonstrated through an examination of the activities of the Japan Society of London, where Waley presented one of his first translations. The School of Oriental Studies in London also provided a platform for the translation and dissemination of Asian literature for the express purpose of promoting British imperial interests in the Far East. As an orientalist working through these institutions and the British Museum, Waley's positioning of himself as a Bloomsbury anti-imperialist was ambiguous. His texts, moreover, had a role to play in the presentation of Japan as an essentially aesthetic, 'feminine' nation. There are few letters, and no diaries or working papers of Waley. I rely, therefore, on his published works, as well as the memoirs, letters and biographies of family members and friends, especially those of the Bloomsbury Group with which he was associated. I make extensive use of the Transactions of the Japan Society and historical records of the School of Oriental Studies, as well as critical reviews of Waley and other translators. Social and cultural histories of the period are used to construct key. contexts: the Anglo-Jews, the Cambridge Fabians, British orientalism, and English modernism between the wars. Since I maintain that homoeroticism in Japanese literature was one of its attractions for Waley, I also look to queer theory to assist in my reading of Waley's texts. I conclude that The Tale of Genji enabled Waley to realize a personal ambition to write stories, and he produced a unique English novel that remains not only the most important modernist interpretation of Japanese culture between the wars, but a remarkable record of Edwardian-Bloomsbury language and aesthetic sensibility.

This dissertation studies depictions of the Middle East in the works of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. My discussion focuses on two prominent members of the Brotherhood—Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt—and utilizes an interdisciplinary approach that examines the poetry, prose, unpublished correspondence and journals, sketches, watercolours, and oil paintings that they produced prior to 1856. I argue that Rossetti and Hunt make use of the Middle East as a repository for and reflection of the ambiguities and ambivalences of their own positions as avant-garde artists and authors. Chapters Two and Three focus on the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Chapter Two examines Rossetti’s juvenilia in order to trace the ways in which the young author-artist uses the Middle East as a platform from which to work out the interplay between narrative and image, the conceptualization of the role of the author and artist, and the use of realistically depicted elements in religious painting. Chapter Three continues this discussion of Rossetti through an investigation of the 1850 edition of his poem “The Burden of Nineveh,” which centres on an encounter with an ancient Assyrian statue, and I argue that Rossetti links this artifact to the P. R. B. and uses it to critique the artistic ideals of mid-nineteenth-century England. The next two chapters shift to an investigation of William Holman Hunt’s first visit to the Middle East in 1854-6, a journey that became a focal point of the author-artist’s career. Chapter Four makes extensive use of Hunt’s unpublished diaries and letters from his sojourn in the Holy Land to destabilize the widespread conception of the artist as a staunch imperialist and the foremost English religious painter of the nineteenth century. Building on this foundation, Chapter Five looks back to the three months that Hunt spent in Egypt in 1854 and investigates the ways in which the complex experiences that the author-artist describes in his unpublished letters from this period filter into the watercolours, sketches, and oil paintings that he executed in Egypt. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2009-06-16 15:46:17.016