The debate over the fragmentary nature of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan" continued from the time the poem was written 1797 to the present day. Some critics believe that "Kubla Khan" is a complete work in its entirety, while others argue that it is simply an unfinished fragment, a curiosity. The reductionist view of "Kubla Khan" as an incomplete novelty does Coleridge a grave disservice. On the other hand, Coleridge's own description of his poem as a fragment, as well as the chaotic disconnection of the poem itself, make it difficult to call the work finished in any conventional sense. Instead, "Kubla Khan" could represent the author's understanding of the mysterious and fractional world of the East. The Romantics were deeply fascinated by the East and always represented it as a dense and elusive myth rather than a real place. Western Romantics depicted Orientals as primitive, morally underdeveloped, and immutable, but they were intensely attracted to the East precisely because it provided an alternative to the West. In this “otherization” of the East, the Romantics fashioned a vision of Orientals that mirrored their own culture, rather than basing their perceptions on any legitimate truth about the East. The East became the paradoxically attractive symbol of the darkest and most sinister elements of Western society: a fused fragment based on Western projection and desire. The orientalism evident in “Kubla Khan” is still relevant as a lens through which to view modern texts such as the film “Citizen Kane.” Modern interpretations of Orientalism have been broadened to include not only the racialized and othered Other, but also aspects of the Self. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essayThe fragmentation of the East is twofold. First, filtered through the subjective lens of Orientalism, Western knowledge of the Orient will always be incomplete. Second, although the orientalist seeks to write about the East, he deliberately and consciously separates himself from it, so that he is intrinsically separate from the subject of his text. Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" is the poetic embodiment of the Romantic fragment, what E. S. Shaffer calls an "epic fragment." In his poem, Coleridge includes a preface entitled "Of the Fragment of Kubla Khan". The word "fragment" refers to the poem itself, which he regards as a "psychological curiosity" rather than a finished work, but it also refers to Coleridge's inability to capture the totality of the images that "rose before him as things... .without any awareness of the effort." While he sleeps in an opium trance, Coleridge's mind, as if possessed, composes for him "two or three hundred lines", so that when he wakes up, the poem already exists as a whole: "what had originally been, so to speak, given". to him." His duty as a poet, then, is simply to remember and record what was already a complete composition. However, the perfect vision that appears to the poet while he is unconscious mysteriously dissipates once he attempts to capture it, as the fragment of which the Romantic artist has a subconscious understanding but whose completion will invariably escape possibility Just as the poet decrees and then creates the lines in his poem, so "To Xanadu Kubla Khan / a majestic decree on the pleasure dome." Fred L. Milne states: "If indeed 'Kubla Khan' became... a poem about the creative process set in the general context of the mind and its activities,so where... is the creative power found? poetry, that function is best fulfilled by Kubla Khan himself, for it is he alone who creates in the mental landscape." The orientalist studies the Orient to distinguish himself from it, and his writings are proof that he exists outside of it. his text. Coleridge enters the fantastical world of for him; he consciously fragments himself from the subject of his work. The tone of the poem reflects the astonished and bewildered narrator, who finds himself in a bizarre and foreign land that fascinates him simply because he cannot fully understand it emerge and the reader would have to allow the images to speak for themselves. To analyze or explain the extravagant and mystifying Eastern world would produce nothing in translation, since the rational Western observer cannot, due to his rationalism, understand the emotional Orient. , occult and spiritualist. The "cavets measureless for man" reflect the immeasurability of Xanadu's chimerical scenery, and the poet's continued use of contradictory language, such as "sunny...ice caves" and 'air', brings to mind the difficulty that rational and deductive Western language encounters when attempting to describe the alien Orient. Western language must resort to the use of logically incomprehensible paradoxes to evoke the logically incomprehensible East. Kubla Kahn says he would "build that dome in the air"; The poet Coleridge constructs his own because he presupposes the symbolic meaning of the Asian images he represents. The England in which Coleridge lived had designated meanings for images such as the oriental harem, filled with women playing the dulcimer, odalisques weeping for their demon lovers, and Abyssinian virgins singing Paradise. The poetry that arose under Coleridge's eyelids in his sleep was constructed in the air of his imagination. Despite its extravagant and extravagant imagery, the Western reader legitimizes this unfounded work because he or she has already dismissed the Oriental as intrinsically different from – and inferior to – the rational and virtuous European. Since the Oriental lived in a world entirely his own, and since that world was by definition paradoxical to the principles of the West, Eastern images did not need to be understood or even tolerated by the West. Coleridge asks readers of "Kubla Khan" to act as spectators like himself rather than participants. It invites readers to Xanadu by relying on the "built in the air" clichés and conventions that are already part of the Western vocabulary used to denote and signify the Orient. The use of paradoxical but corresponding opposites in his poetry is what Richard Harter Fogle calls the Romantic "picturesque", a combination of paradoxical images that resolve themselves through a process of signification that relies on the mind of the reader, the interpreter of the symbols . The paradoxical picturesque reappears in its modern form in Orson Welles's seminal film, Citizen Kane, which shows visual fragments of Charles Foster Kane's life - from childhood to death - with the aim of conveying to the audience a sense of his character. Of course, at the end of the film, the moral of the story is that Kane's life is still a mystery despite having been told in full on the big screen, and that it is perhaps impossible for anyone's life to be fully explained. Thompson, the journalist who undertakes the quest to discover the meaning of "Rosebud", admits at the end of the film that he does not.