Edward Said - Literary Criticism

Literary Criticism

The first book that Edward Saïd published, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966), was an expansion of the doctoral dissertation he presented to earn the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Afterwards, Saïd redacted ideas gleaned from the works of the 17th-century polymathGiambattista Vico (1668–1744), and other intellectuals, in the book Beginnings: Intention and Method (1974), about the theoretical bases of literary criticism. Saïd’s further bibliographic production features The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature: Yeats and Decolonization (1988), Culture and Imperialism (1993), Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (1994), Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004), and On Late Style (2006).

Like his post-modern intellectual mentors, the philosophers Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, Saïd was fascinated by how the people of the Western world perceive the peoples of and the things from a different culture, and by the effects of society, politics, and power upon literature, thus is Edward Saïd a founding intellectual of post-colonial criticism. Although the critique of Orientalism is his especially important cultural contribution, it was the critical interpretations of the works of Joseph Conrad, Jane Austen, Rudyard Kipling, William Butler Yeats, and other writers, that were the influential scholarship that established his intellectual reputation as “Prof. Edward Saïd”.

Orientalism

As a cultural critic, Edward Saïd is most famous for the description and the critique of Orientalism as the source of the culturally inaccurate representations that are the foundation of Western thought towards the Middle East, of how The West perceives and represents The East. The book Orientalism (1978) proposed the existence of a “subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo–Islamic peoples and their culture”, which derives from Western culture’s long tradition of false and romanticized images of Asia, in general, and the Middle East, in particular. That such perceptions and derived cultural representations have served, and continue to serve, as implicit justifications for the colonial and imperialist ambitions of the European powers and of the U.S. Likewise, Saïd also criticized and denounced the political and the cultural malpractices of the régimes of the ruling Arab élites who have internalized the false, romanticized representations of Arabic culture that were conceived and established by Anglo–American Orientalists.

So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Moslems and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab–Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have, instead, is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression.

In Orientalism, Saïd proposed and contended that much Western study of Islamic civilization was political intellectualism meant for self-affirmation, rather than for objective intellectual enquiry and academic study, which practically functioned as a method of cultural discrimination, and as a tool of imperialist domination; the Westerner knows more about the Orient than do the Orientals. As such, Orientalism has exerted much intellectual impact upon the fields of literary theory, cultural studies, human geography, history, and Oriental studies. Parting from the works of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, and those of the early Western critics of Orientalism — such as Abdul Latif Tibawi (“English-speaking Orientalists: A Critique of Their Approach to Islam and Arab Nationalism”, 1964), Anouar Abdel-Malek (“L’orientalisme en crise”; “Orientalism in Crisis”, 1963), Maxime Rodinson (“Bilan des études mohammadiennes” | “Assessment of Mohammedan Studies”, 1963), and Richard William Southern (Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages, 1978), — that “Orientalism” (“The Orient” as studied from “The West”) and the derived perceptions of “The East” purveyed in them, are intellectually suspect, and cannot be accepted at their face value, as faithful, true, and accurate representations of Oriental peoples and things. That the history of European colonial rule, and of the consequent political domination of the civilizations of the East, distorts the writing of even the most knowledgeable, well-meaning, and culturally sympathetic Western Orientalists; thus was the term “Orientalism” rendered into a pejorative.

I doubt if it is controversial, for example, to say that an Englishman in India, or Egypt, in the later nineteenth century, took an interest in those countries which was never far from their status, in his mind, as British colonies. To say this may seem quite different from saying that all academic knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact — and yet that is what I am saying in this study of Orientalism.

That, since Antiquity, in the Arts of the Western World, “The Orient” has been represented with and by stereotypes; for example, in the Greek tragedy The Persians (472 BC), by Aeschylus, wherein the protagonist fails and falls because he misperceived the true nature of The East. Contemporarily, Europe has politically dominated Asia to the degree that even the most outwardly objective Western texts about “The Orient’’ are culturally biased to a degree unrecognized by Western scholars, who appropriated for themselves the intellectual tasks of study, the exploration, and the interpretation of the languages, histories, and cultures of the Orient; thereby implying that such (subaltern) peoples were incapable of speaking for themselves, and much less capable of composing their own cultural and historical narratives. Western (European) Orientalists have written Asia’s past — and thus constructed its modern identities — from a perspective that establishes The West (Europe) as the cultural norm to emulate, from which norm the “exotic and inscrutable” Orient deviates.

Orientalism concluded that Western writing about The Orient depicts it as an irrational, weak and feminised “Other”, an existential condition which is greatly contrasted with the rational, strong, and masculine “West”, which is a binary relation derived from the European psychological need to create a “difference” of cultural inequality between The West and The East; the difference is attributed to immutable cultural “essences” inherent to “Oriental” peoples and things. In 1978, the intellectual, cultural, and commercial successes of the book Orientalism were aided by the historical resonance of the Yom Kippur war (6–25 October 1973), and of the 1973 Oil Embargo crises of reduced petroleum-production, with which the OPEC countries made themselves politically known to The Western World.