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William Jones
Ernest Renan was an 19th-century French Orientalist who studied Semitic languages and the history of Christianity and the Bible. Belonging to the generation of scholarship after Sacy, Renan was an important intellectual figure in his time (the later 19th and early 20th centuries), although his work wasn’t without controversy. In Orientalism, Edward Said offers Renan as an example of the kind of Orientalist who who draws from their study of the past to self-consciously create the Orient for others to consume. In his patriarchal view of history, Renan also exemplifies some of the latent sexism and gender dynamics in Orientalist discourse.
Ernest Renan Quotes in Orientalism
The Orientalism quotes below are all either spoken by Ernest Renan or refer to Ernest Renan. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 2, Part 2
Quotes
What is given on the page and in the museum case is a truncated exaggeration, like many of Sacy’s Oriental extracts, whose purpose is to exhibit a relationship between the science (or scientist) and the object, not one between the object and nature. Read almost any page of Renan on Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, or proto-Semitic and you read a fact of power, by which the Orientalist philologist’s authority summons out of the library at will examples of man’s speech, and ranges them there surrounded by a suave European prose that points out defects, virtues, barbarisms, and shortcomings in the language, the people, and the civilization. The tone and the tense of the exhibition are cast almost uniformly in the contemporary present, so that one is given an impression of a pedagogical demonstration during which the scholar-scientist stands before us on a lecture-laboratory platform, creating, confining, and judging the material he discusses.
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Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire Orientalism LitChart as a printable PDF.
Ernest Renan Quotes in Orientalism
The Orientalism quotes below are all either spoken by Ernest Renan or refer to Ernest Renan. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 2, Part 2
Quotes
What is given on the page and in the museum case is a truncated exaggeration, like many of Sacy’s Oriental extracts, whose purpose is to exhibit a relationship between the science (or scientist) and the object, not one between the object and nature. Read almost any page of Renan on Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, or proto-Semitic and you read a fact of power, by which the Orientalist philologist’s authority summons out of the library at will examples of man’s speech, and ranges them there surrounded by a suave European prose that points out defects, virtues, barbarisms, and shortcomings in the language, the people, and the civilization. The tone and the tense of the exhibition are cast almost uniformly in the contemporary present, so that one is given an impression of a pedagogical demonstration during which the scholar-scientist stands before us on a lecture-laboratory platform, creating, confining, and judging the material he discusses.
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
