Criticism and society : the role of the intellectual in the work of Edward Said

This project is an attempt to elucidate the literary, philosophical, and political assumptions that undergird the criticism of Edward W. Said, particularly as these assumptions manifest themselves in three major works: Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, Beginnings: Intention and Method, and Orientalism. My argument is that Said's career can be divided into two overlapping phases. In the first phase, Said tends to engage literary-philosophical topics, particularly as these concerns relate to the predicament of modernity. In the second phase, Said's criticism becomes political. A crucial strand in my argument is that Said combines several different methodologies all of which reflect the critical debates of the last three decades: phenomenological hermeneutics, linguistic structuralism, and a discontinuous, cyclical version of history. Said's appropriation of these barely compatible theoretical insights often creates tensions, ambiguities, and contradictions. However, Said suggests that, given the ontological homelessness of the modern intellectual, a functionalist attitude to writing is inevitable. This at once skeptical and recuperative spirit can be found in various guises in modern intellectual history. At the same time, however, Said insists that this functionalism often colludes with received dogma, fashioning negative intercultural representations–in Orientalist scholarship, for example. The critical intellectual must, therefore, be alert to the relationship between literary texts and the socio-political environment in which they are produced so that he or she can use critical tools to further human dignity and freedom.