The article focuses on the study of the meaning, occurrence and use of the term Orient and its derivatives — associated words related to it — in the Polish language. The starting point is the concept of a linguistic image of the world that assumes the dependence of the individual’s perception of reality on the language he or she uses. A person, learning about the world, experiences it with the help of native speech, which imposes a certain specific way of thinking. The language appears as a filter and a ready set of interpretive schemes that impose a specific point of view on the user. The aim of the presented research is the reconstruction of the linguistic image of the non-linguistic reality section represented by the Orient lexeme and its derivatives. The study covered the National Corpus of the Polish Language, more widely available dictionary and encyclopedic definitions, and types of usage that can be observed in the contemporary public space represented by the so-called old and new media. The article also focuses on the connotations of the word Orient appearing in the Polish language system. An important part of the research focuses on the functioning of the analyzed lexeme and its derivatives in Polish culture, taking into account the changes taking place. The observed changes were separated and described, then presented in a chronological manner. The presented analysis creates the possibility of a better understanding of the perception of the Orient by people speaking Polish.
The paper refers to Tadeusz Róźewicz’s travel accounts from the Far East written in the 1950s and read as report poetry that is to remind a ‘magic crystal ball.’ It is meant to view the Orient in such a way as if there was not any intermediary, though the form negates itself to reveal that otherness opposes presentation and remains self-governing. The categories of post-colonial criticism are employed here to demonstrate how Różewicz challenges the dualistic understanding of identity, how he perceives the Oriental culture and nature, the effects of communist power, and the civilisational changes in China and in Mongolia. A postmodern approach to the imaginary and the sublime serves to justify the conclusion that one is unable to understand and grasp the Orient in the same way as one cannot comprehend and verbalise what is extra-human.
Tourism has become an important sector in Turkey as a growing source of foreign exchange reserves and employment over the last two decades. An increasing number of foreign tourists makes the Turkish Riviera an area of intense global interaction. According to Arjun Appadurai, the new global cultural economy has to be seen as an overlapping, disjunctive order that can no longer be understood in terms of the existing center-periphery models. This article will explore such disjunctures and deal with the complex “-scapes” of the Turkish Riviera. It aims to look at the relationships among the five dimensions of the global cultural flow: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes. One goal of this review is to examine if the concept of “the Orient” coined by Edward Said still exists within the discourse and the visual imagery of tourism.
PL
Na przestrzeni ostatnich dwóch dekad turystyka stała się najmocniejszą stroną tureckiej gos-podarki, zaś najchętniej odwiedzane miejsca w Turcji są sceną intensywnych interakcji spo-łeczno-kulturowych o charakterze globalnym. Analizując złożoną specyfikę przestrzeni pub-licznej w kurortach na obszarze Riwiery Tureckiej, zastosuję zaproponowany przez Arjuna Appaduraia model bazujący na rozłącznym przepływie kategorii określonych przez autora mianem pejzaży. Głównym celem analizy jest zbadanie czy “Orient” w ujęciu Edwarda Saida nadal istnieje w dyskursie turystycznym i związanym z nim obrazowaniu.
Tkaniny używane w Polsce w okresie średniowiecza pochodzące z wiodących ośrodków tkackich położonych w krajach Wschodu stanowią ciekawy i wartościowy zespół. Sprowadzano je przede wszystkim w celu wykonania z nich paramentów, stanowić też mogły elementy wystroju kaplic lub wnętrz świeckich. Bogate i oryginalne pod względem wzorów, tkane z jedwabiu z dużą ilością złota w wyspecjalizowanych warsztatach, były wyrazem prestiżu i gustu elit zarówno kościelnych, jak i świeckich. Tkaniny wschodnie w zbiorach polskich można połączyć w grupy. Pierwsza, może najbardziej jednolita stylistycznie i technicznie, składa się z tkanin, których wykonanie przypisywane jest warsztatom Cypru i Kairu czynnym w okresie panowania sułtanatu Mameluków (1250-1517), szczególnie w okresie 1250-1382. Drugi zespół tkanin stanowią wykonane w Konstantynopolu lub Bursie przed 1449 rokiem. Odrębną grupę stanowią paramenty z tkanin, w których wzorze występuje rytmicznie powtarzany arabski napis przechowywane w Muzeum Narodowym w Gdańsku, pochodzące z kościoła Mariackiego w Gdańsku, wykonane w warsztatach na terenie północnej Persji około poł. XIV wieku.
EN
Textiles produced in the leading weavers’ centres of the Orient and used in Poland during the Middle Ages make an interesting and valuable complex. They were imported mainly for liturgical vestments but also for decoration of chapels and secular interiors. Richly and uniquely designed, woven in specialized workshops from silk with large amount of gold, they demonstrated prestige and taste of the ecclesiastical and secular elites. Eastern textiles in Polish collections may be combined in separate groups. The first group, perhaps the most uniform in style and technique, comprises textiles whose origin is attributed to the workshops in Cyprus and Cairo, active under the Mamluc Sultanate (1250–1517), especially in the period 1250–1382. The second group are the textile produced in Constantinople or Brusa before 1449. Another group comprises paraments made of textiles whose pattern includes a rhythmically repeated Arabic inscription stored at National Museum in Gdańsk and coming from the store of the St Mary’s Church in Gdańsk, produced in workshops of northern Persia around the middle of the 14th century.
It is important to notice that romantic literature abounded in diverse memoirs. The most characteristic feature connected with this kind of literature is the fact that many of the memoirs were written by prisoners and exiles, commanding officers and even peasant farmers. Furthermore, many opuses were created after long journeys to the East. This study, focused on memories of Pastor Henryk Leopold Bartsch, presents different ways of experiencing and describing the Oriental sphere. Moreover, the following paper shows the lack of differences between the romantic and enlightenment style of depicting foreign territories and presents Pastor’s Bartsch own way of describing other customs and religions. To summarise, the whole study tries to find an answer to the question about the most significant function of romantic memoires.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1797 poem “Kubla Khan” begins with the statement that Kubla Khan once caused a pleasure-dome to come into existence by dint of a kingly decree. The last line states that the narrator, should he gain suffi cient poetic vision, would have “drunk the milk of paradise” and would “build that dome in air.” A new reading may be derived from a focus on precisely what these lines say and what they imply within the perspective of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s work Anti-Oedipus. If the process of the narrator’s gaining poetic insight is set in motion by a conscious decree from Kubla Khan, then an Anti-Oedipal reading considers whether the end result is simply the consequence a powerful individual’s wishes, or else is paradoxically a liberation from those wishes.
Artykuł poświęcony jest wizjom Orientu w trzech wybranych utworach Paula Scheerbarta: „Śmierć Barmakidów. Arabska powieść haremowa” (1897), „Tarub. Sławna kucharka z Bagdadu. Arabska powieść kulturowa” (1897) oraz „Żarty o władzy. Nowele arabskie” (1904). Ponieważ autor nigdy nie odwiedził Bliskiego Wschodu, odwoływał się w swoich utworach do tekstów źródłowych, które dowolnie przekształcał. Namiętność, tęsknota za wyższymi wartościami, brutalność, żądza zemsty oraz walka o władzę, która kończy się rzezią, przeplatają się z baśniowymi sceneriami i legendarnymi istotami, aby odwieść odbiorcę od myśli, że Bagdad równie dobrze mógłby być Berlinem, rok 897 – rokiem 1897, a problemy Aschy – problemami samego Scheerbarta.
DE
Der Beitrag ist Paul Scheerbarts Orientdarstellungen in drei ausgewählten Werken gewidmet: "Der Tod der Barmekiden. Arabischer Haremsroman" (1897), "Tarub. Bagdads berühmte Köchin. Arabischer Kulturroman" (1897) und "Machtspässe. Arabische Novellen" (1904). Weil der Autor den Nahen Osten nie besucht hat, stützte er sich bei seinen Beschreibungen auf mehrere Quellen, die er dann beliebig umgestaltet hat. Leidenschaft, Sehnsucht nach höheren Werten, Brutalität, Rachsucht und Kämpfe um die Macht, die mit Blutbädern enden, verflechten sich mit märchenhaften Szenerien und sagenhaften Wesen, um den Rezipienten von dem Gedanken abzulenken, dass das alte Bagdad für Berlin, das Jahr 897 für 1897 und Aschas Probleme für jene von Scheerbart stehen könnten. Dichter-, Welt- und Rebellenmacht – in diesen drei Worten drückt sich das Wesen des Scheerbartschen Orients aus.
EN
'The article was dedicated to presentations of the Orient in three selected works by Paul Scheerbart: 'The death of the Barmakids. Arab Harem novel' (1897), 'Tarub. Baghdad's famous female cook. Arab culture novel' (1897) and 'Jests about power. Arab novellas' (1904). As the author has never visited the Middle East, he draws from several sources, which he then transforms as he wishes. Passion, longing for higher values, brutality, revenge and fighting for the power ending with bloodbaths intertwine with the fairytale sceneries and legendary beings, to distract the recipient from the thought that the old Baghdad is Berlin, the year 897 – 1897 and Ascha’s problems could be the problems of Scheerbart. Power of poets, world and rebels – the essence of Scheerbart’s Orient is expressed in these words.
Giacinto Scelsi was a “traveller to the East”, who tied his life inextricably to creative work. As a composer, he sought a path for the renewal of his own musical language, shaped during his youth under the powerful influence of other composers’ styles. On becoming a homo religiosus, in the Eliadean sense, he found his own path to transcendence through art (creation), deeply inspired by those great traditions of the Orient in which art was a reflection of the artist’s spirituality. The topos of the path is one of the main keys to interpreting Scelsi’s work. His works for large orchestra and choir contain distinct traces of a Scelsian “voyage to the East”. They form one great cycle, integrated by the motif of the path, expressed through meanings added in the content of the individual programme-titles. The cycle’s finale, the eschatological Pfhat (1974), is the musical depiction of a journey that ends with “a clear, primordial light,” symbolising man’s encounter with a higher reality and “great liberation” as the goal of his spiritual path. The chronotope of the path is revealed in the very musical material of his orchestral works: in their quasi-visual soundspace. It is manifest, among other things, in the processual form - one might even say the storyline - and the consistently applied procedure of transforming sonorities, texture and rhythmic structures. A fundamental symbolic function is discharged by various forms of “upwards path”, linked to the dramaturgical role of an upwards motion pattern in the melody and an upwards movement in the tonal-harmonic plan of the orchestral works. The most crucial of all the variants of the motif of the path is the direction “into the core”, that is, towards the “inner space” of the sound. This carries significance both in the dimension of the harmonic spectrum of a sound and also its spiritual depth - the mystical dimension. The journey to the centre acquires the status of an emblematic topos of the Scelsian poetic of the viaggio al centro del suono [journey to the centre of the sound].
Through an overview of modern Japanese historiography this essay examines the dilemma faced by non-Western (East) and non-modern places when trying to write their own history. The formulation of modern history onto Newtonian time and space-chronological time (progress) and nation-states has been remarkably stable when viewed from the West, but troubling for non-Western places. Since 1868 (Meiji revolution) when a new government endeavored to turn the archipelago into a modern nation-state, Japanese intellectuals and historians accepted the necessity of writing a history of Japan and simultaneously struggled to overcome the stigma of being East or Oriental. They developed several now familiar strategies: more historical research, alternative modernity, and search for authenticity. None accomplished the goal of equivalence. This essay argues that the problems they encountered are in the structure of history itself, in particular, the way that chronological time locks the non-West into a recursive pattern, forever of the East.
The East, its culture and literature were always part of the rich, erudite poetic imagination of Tadeusz Łada-Zabłocki (1811–1847), a tsarist exile to the Caucasus. He spoke Oriental languages (Georgian and Persian) and had a thorough knowledge of the Koran, a short fragment of which he even translated (probably from French). Although today we only have his poetry inspired by the Caucasian mountains, he was also no stranger to extensive travel accounts (unfortunately, his Dziennik podróży mojej do Tyflisu i z Tyflisu po różnych krajach za Kaukazem (Journal From My Journey To and From Tiflis Across Various Countries Beyond the Caucasus) and notes from his Armenian expedition were lost). An important source of inspiration for Zabłocki, encouraging him to explore the East, were the Philomaths’ translations of Oriental poetry by Jan Wiernikowski and Aleksander Chodźko, while his model of reception of the Orient were the oeuvres of Mickiewicz (primarily his Crimean and Odessa Sonnets), Byron and Thomas Moore (especially the fragment of Lalla Rookh — Paradise and the Peri). The exile brutally brought Zabłocki into contact with the real Orient, terribly dangerous and diametrically different from the one described by Western travellers. It is, therefore, not surprising, that their superficial and simplified accounts were criticised by the Polish poet and soldier. Zabłocki’s oeuvre, both pre-exile and Caucasus period works, is full of various Oriental reminiscences: from the Biblical topos of the Paradise ab Oriente, through numerous splendid images of Caucasian nature, scenes from the life of Caucasian highlanders, poetic imitation of the metre of Caucasian folk dances, apt ethnographic observations in the verses, borrowings from Oriental languages, extraordinarily sensual eastern erotic poems, to translations of texts of Caucasian cultures (Tatar, Azeri and Georgian songs). Zabłocki drew on both folk culture of Caucasian tribes, and on Eastern mythologies as well as universal culture of the Islamic world. He presents an ambivalent image of Caucasian highlanders in his poetry: sometimes they acquire traits of noble, free, valiant and indomitable individuals, typical of the Romantic idea of highlanders, on other occasions the label “Son of the East” becomes a synonym of Asian barbarity. Freed from the service in the tsarist army, Zabłocki planned travels across nearby Persia, Asia Minor, and even Arabia, Nubia and Palestine. However, the plans never became a reality, owing to a lack of funds and the poet’s early death of cholera. Zabłocki’s “Eastern” oeuvre fully reveals the “liminal”, demarcational nature of the Caucasian mountains, for centuries constituting the limes between Europe and Asia, the East and the West, a meeting place of the Christian and the Muslim Orients.
The present paper focuses on the linguistic image of the Oriental world depicted in the essay–afterword to the book of short stories Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement [Women of Algiers] by Assia Djebar. Entitled after the famous painting by Eugène Delacroix the book’s aim is to show the history of Algeria and of Algerian women since the short visit paid to the country by the French painter up to 1980s.The author of this paper wants to focus on the language Assia Djebar uses in her text. Thanks to the recurrence of some keywords she manages to render in her text the typical way of describing the Oriental world in 19th century (the Romantic fascination for Oriental lands and customs) and afterwards the seclusion and submission of Algerian women resulting from patriarchal tradition.However, it seems that Assia Djebar uses her language as a cubist painter (by the way, she refers in her essay to the painting Women of Algiers by Picasso), she deconstructs the linguistic reality to create a new world for Oriental women where, at least linguistically, seclusion changes into final liberation.
The paper focuses on the image of Oriental women emerging from some travel writings from the second half of the 19th century. Influenced by the model of a sensual Oriental woman from One Thousand and One Nights and portraits of voluptuous odalisques; while in the Middle East, the travellers confront their dreamt image with the reality. Do they confirm it or challenge it? The texts of Nerval, Flaubert, Fromentin, Colet and Gasparin, who travelled to Egypt between 1843 and 1869, are analysed to answer this question and to see how the authors represent Oriental women.
The present paper focuses on some representations of male Oriental dancers who dance dressed as women. It tries to answer the question whether those representations form a caricature of the Oriental woman or if it is another, perverse, Oriental dream. The first part of the paper presents the Oriental male dancer and shows how he was perceived in the Middle East and in Europe. The second part discusses the critics of male dancers’ behaviour in the travelogues by Jean Potocki and Vivant Denon. The three following sections analyse three examples of descriptions dating from the 1840-1850 by Gérard de Nerval, Gustave Flaubert and Théophile Gautier. It turns out that, with time, the caricature becomes less obvious and the descriptions are more and more aesthetic. One can no longer only mock and condemn the male dancers, a new perverse dream seems to be born.
FR
La contribution analyse quelques représentations des danseurs orientaux qui dansent habillés en femmes et cherche à répondre à la question de savoir si ces représentations forment une caricature de la femme orientale ou s'il s'agit d'un autre rêve pervers d'Orient. La première partie présente la danseuse mâle et montre sa perception en Orient et en Europe. La seconde partie évoque la critique du comportement des danseuses mâles présente dans les relations de voyage de Jean Potocki et de Vivant Denon. Les trois dernières parties analysent trois descriptions datant des années 1840-1850, créées par Gérard de Nerval, Gustave Flaubert et Théophile Gautier. Il s'avère qu'avec le temps, la caricature devient moins évidente qu'auparavant et les descriptions s'esthétisent. Il n'est plus possible de ne faire que se moquer des danseuses mâles ou les condamner. Un nouveau rêve pervers d'Orient semble faire son émergence.
The importance of the oriental theme in François de Belleforest’s works is well known. Here we study strictly religious matters (which may seem questionable, but one aim of our paper is to define points of contact or separation between religious and ethnic identities). How is the Muslim religion represented in the Histoire universelle, in the Cosmographie universelle and the Histoires tragiques? These three texts, or series of texts, reveal an intellectual interest, and even an aesthetic interest, for Islam. Of course, this interest cannot be said openly. We highlight the obstacles Belleforest encounters and the way he circumvents them. Strategies of dissimulation are worthy of scrutiny, because they let emerge an additional curiosity for Islam: a curiosity of a moral order, especially perceptible in fiction.
FR
L’importance du thème oriental chez François de Belleforest est bien connue. On resserre ici le point de vue sur le propos proprement religieux de son oeuvre, non sans montrer ce que ce resserrement peut avoir de contestable, de manière à le problématiser. Comment l’islam est-il représenté dans l’Histoire universelle, dans la Cosmographie universelle et dans les Histoires tragiques ? Ces trois textes, ou séries de textes, révèlent un intérêt d’ordre intellectuel, voire esthétique, pour la religion musulmane. Bien entendu, cet intérêt ne peut se donner tout à fait libre cours. Il nous intéresse sur-tout par les obstacles qu’il rencontre et la manière dont il les contourne. Mais on le devine, derrière des stratégies de dissimulation qu’il vaut la peine de scruter, car elles laissent affleurer une curiosité supplémentaire pour l’islam : une curiosité d’ordre moral, surtout sensible dans la fiction.
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