On Romantic Orientalism, dispatch 1.

In a paper delivered in 1947 to a symposium on "Near Eastern Culture and Society"--included in a volume collected under that title, edited by T. Cuyler Young, and published in 1951 by Princeton University Press--the Orientalist Gustave E. von Grunebaum observed that "Romanticism through its belief in a universal poetry manifest in each national literature, and the neo-humanism of the inter-war period with its realization of the conceptual autonomy of the individual civilization, have proved the principal intellectual stimuli toward the investigation of Arabic belles-lettres" (p. 48). von Grunebaum would also point out, however, that the "poetic universalism of the romantic mood proved a poor heuristic principle as soon as philology uncovered the foreignness and somewhat prosy technicality of pre-Islamic literature. Where self-identification was possible for the student steeped in playful nostalgia for medieval pomp and chivalry, the aesthetics of Arabic song remained accessible" (p. 49). This strikes me as a somewhat begrudging but sincere acknowledgement by a philologist of the genuine contribution that fantasy and play have made towards "serious" scholarship. Romanticism can take us to places where we would not otherwise venture; furthermore, it can equip us with an attitude appropriate to sanguine exploration of foreign territory. We can do--and have done--much worse...