Said in the Context Of Literary Criticism

Blog Post #1: Edward Said, by Bill Ashcroft and Pal Ahluwalia

What we’ve read so far Edward Said is a very thorough and informative description of Said’s works, theories, and literary and political stances. For me, what worked best about the way the authors present Said’s work is how they constantly reference and compare Said to other literary critics, writers, and political thinkers. Personally I had never heard of Edward Said before, so the contextualization of his work in the framework of Foucault, Barthes, and Derrida, literary theorists with whom I am more familiar, makes it easier for me to understand what Said is saying and what he is reacting against. They also do not simply state that Said in some ways positively incorporated the works of Foucault into his own texts: instead they describe specifically where and how he uses Foucault or departs from Foucault’s theories. This ability to contextualize Said with other famous critics is a major strength of the book.

Particularly, I feel the authors do an excellent job of persuading the reader to side with Said’s support of the “worldliness” of the text as opposed to a strict structuralist critical approach in which everything one needs to know about the text is in the text, that is a thing of itself divorced from, and even in place or, the concrete realities of the world. Intrinsically it makes more sense for me to follow Said’s line of reasoning about the connection between the text and political realities than it does to consider the text as something outside of time and circumstance. Particularly, I liked how the authors did not simply state Said’s theories or summarize his writings, but instead provided a rich context of works that he is reacting against in order to give context and meaning to his “key ideas”. Similarly, the authors do not leave Said’s work in some sort of critical void, but instead consider some of the major criticisms written in response to Said’s books, specifically Orientalism.

 As for my expectations for this class, I think that beginning with Edward Said lays a positive groundwork. Starting with a theoretical analysis of world literature and how the “West” has created the image of Orientalism is a useful way to enter into the other, fictional texts that we will be reading. Without this solid theoretical groundwork, the ensuing novels we will be reading will not be as fully appreciated in the larger context of global literature, and how different cultures and parts of the world are interacting with each other.