For a course in Romanticism and the Orient - for those of you who have any familiarity with Edward Said, his book is a central focus of the course - I have decided to write on Lord Byron's The Giaour and the politics of poetic fragmentation.
If you'd care to comment, I'd be happy to take either suggestions, comments, or questions of any sort. Or you can simply read for your own personal amusement... if such a thing could be amusing.
Lord Byron’s The Giaour textually creates a fragmented Oriental space that articulates a poetic instability simultaneously performed for and by the Giaour himself. Written out of a tradition of Romantic Orientalism in which the Oriental fragment poem – like Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and others – Byron’s poem creates its own illusive history, lodging itself within an invented context of incompleteness. The Giaour – like its titular central figure – uses its Oriental history as a site of Otherness; the Giaour himself is as Other within the context of the poem as the poem itself. From this place of Otherness, the Giaour is spoken of and speaks textual self-division; the place and voice of the Oriental fisherman and the monk highlight the dual Otherness of the Giaour while the Giaour himself declares his own fragmentation in his final confession. Locked in a relationship of self-reflection and destruction with both Hassan and Leila, the Giaour ultimately condemns himself to incompleteness – mentally and spiritually –through an inability to reconcile the levels of hatred and Otherness within his own identity. Byron’s The Giaour performs the self-fragmentation of its central figure through spatial Oriental division and duality, creating within its broken lines of text an inescapable prison of reflective instability secured by the parallels between the alien self and the familiar Other of English-Oriental text, finally culminating in a prophecy of Occidental self-destruction qua the unquenchable desire for the imagined historical – and unattainable – Orient.