Introduction: Reframing Exoticism in European Literature

When editing the previous issue of Working Papers in the Humanities, that investigated ‘The Sacred in the Secular in European Literature’, we had to remark on the hegemonic centrality of Christianity in the yet noticeably diverse approaches adopted and themes discussed. We investigated European literature’s confrontation with a superior dimension, and we realized the extent to which that vertical line of conversation was (pre)occupied by a dominant interlocutor: the Christian God. In order to integrate that analysis, the present issue was conceived with another dimension in mind, somewhat complementary to the previous one: the horizontal dialogue that European poets, novelists, playwrights and artists have conducted with Oriental ‘others’. The contributions composing this fourteenth number thus examine European perceptions of the exotic as a means to question these very standpoints’ positions. The term ‘exotic’ derives from the Latin exoticus, and before that from the Greek ἐξωτικός. The Greek adverb ἔξω, meaning ‘outside’, remains in the Latin preposition ex, indicating a movement from somewhere. Already this brief etymological analysis should draw our attention to an often-underestimated detail: the ‘exotic’ suggests a movement from the outside, whereas it has usually inspired approaches that, starting from an alleged centrality, move to an object of analysis whose agency has long been considered (or treated) as almost absent. In fact, to talk about a horizontal level of cultural exchange, while symbolic of an encounter that brings together distant dwellers of the Earth’s surface, actually brackets an element of verticality that exoticism has long betrayed, and that cannot be overlooked. We are talking about the hierarchy according to which, as in Said’s view, ‘Orientalism depends for its strategy on [a] flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand’.