The World, the Text, and the Critic

Edward W. Said

Harvard University Press, 1983 - Literary Criticism - 327 pages

This extraordinarily wide-ranging work represents a new departure for contemporary literary theory. Author of Beginnings and the controversial Orientalism, Edward Said demonstrates that modern critical discourse has been impressively strengthened by the writings of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, for example, and by such influences as Marxism, structuralism, linguistics, and psychoanalysis. He argues, however, that the various methods and schools have had a crippling effect through their tendency to force works of literature to meet the requirements of a theory or system, ignoring the complex affiliations binding the texts to the world.

The critic must maintain a distance both from critical systems and from the dogmas and orthodoxies of the dominant culture, Said contends. He advocates freedom of consciousness and responsiveness to history, to the exigencies of the text, to political, social, and human values, to the heterogeneity of human experience. These characteristics are brilliantly exemplified in his own analyses of individual authors and works.

Combining the principles and practice of criticism, the book offers illuminating investigations of a number of writers--Swift, Conrad, Lukács, Renan, and many others--and of concepts such as repetition, originality, worldliness, and the roles of audiences, authors, and speakers. It asks daring questions, investigates problems of urgent significance, and gives a subtle yet powerful new meaning to the enterprise of criticism in modern society.

Contents

• Secular Criticism: 1
• The World the Text and the Critic: 31
• Swifts Tory Anarchy: 54
• Swift as Intellectual: 72
• The Presentation of Narrative: 90
• On Repetition: 111
• On Originality: 126
• Roads Taken and Not Taken in Contemporary Criticism: 140
• Reflections on American Left Literary Criticism: 158
• Criticism Between Culture and System: 178
• Traveling Theory: 226
• Raymond Schwab and the Romance of Ideas: 248
• Renan and Massignon: 268
• Religious Criticism: 290
• Notes: 295
• Index: 311

About the author

Born in Jerusalem and educated at Victoria College in Cairo and at Princeton and Harvard universities, Edward Said has taught at Columbia University since 1963 and has been a visiting professor at Harvard and Johns Hopkins University. He has had an unusual dual career as a professor of comparative literature, a recognized expert on the novelist and short story writer Joseph Conrad, (see Vol. 1) and as one of the most significant contemporary writers on the Middle East, especially the Palestinian question and the plight of Palestinians living in the occupied territories. Although he is not a trained historian, his Orientalism (1978) is one of the most stimulating critical evaluations of traditional Western writing on Middle Eastern history, societies, and literature. In the controversial Covering Islam (1981), he examined how the Western media have biased Western perspectives on the Middle East. A Palestinian by birth, Said has sought to show how Palestinian history differs from the rest of Arabic history because of the encounter with Jewish settlers and to present to Western readers a more broadly representative Palestinian position than they usually obtain from Western sources. Said is presently Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia, editor of Arab Studies Quarterly, and chair of the board of trustees of the Institute of Arab Studies. He is a member of the Palestinian National Council as well as the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The World, the Text, and the Critic
• Author: Edward W. Said
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1983
• ISBN: 0674961870, 9780674961876
• Length: 327 pages
• Subjects: Literary Criticism / General; Literary Criticism / Semiotics & Theory