A Study Of Said's Theories Of Literary And Cultural Criticism

Edward W. Said (1935-2003), late University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, world-renowned literary and cultural theorist and critic, one of the founders of postcolonial studies and diaspora Palestinian intellectual, possessed complex and paradoxical identities. He published more than 20 books, among which the most representative are Orientalism (1978), The World, the Text and the Critic (1983), Culture and Imperialism (1993) and Representations of the Intellectual (1994). Academically, Said was greatly influenced by Giambattista Vico, Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams, Georg Lukacs, Theodor Adorno, Frantz Fanon and Erich Auerbach. As a theorist and critic, he established his fame and status in two areas:one is the emphasis on the importance of worldliness or material context of both the text and the critic, and the other is analysis and criticism of Orientalism leading to the current postcolonial studies.Said's criticism covers diverse topics, among which the most important are the worldliness of the text and the critic, Orientalism and culture and imperialism. The worldliness of the text and the critic reveals that Said held a determined view of the location of the text, that he emphasized various relations between the text and the world and the traveling and mutation of theories and ideas in different contexts. He was strongly opposed to professionalism of the intellectual work of the critic and advocated secular criticism and critical consciousness. And he stressed the critical distance and the critic's function of representing and criticizing the happenings in the society. The purpose of Said's Orientalism is to illustrate how Europe's representation of the Orient as the Other has been institutionalized at least since the 18th century. In Orientalism Said described the various disciplines, institutions, processes of investigation and styles of thought by which Europeans came to'know'the'Orient'over several centuries. He brought together Foucault's notion of discourse of power and Gramsc's concept of hegemony to challenge the authority of Western knowledge of the Orient. Besides, he adopted the form of Western humanism that takes white, European and middle-class male experience as a key point of reference. Orientalism starts the new area of colonial discourse and combines literature or culture with politics. It breaks the boundaries of disciplines and opens up a new horizon for academic inquiry. But Said's simultaneous use of Foucault, Gramsci and the particular form of Western humanism results in several problems and flaws in its methodology, theoretical formulation and value, thus subject to various criticisms.Culture and Imperialism regarded by Said as a sequel to Orientalism tries to expand the arguments of Orientalism and describe'a more general pattern of relationships between the modern metropolitan West and its overseas territories.'In the book he dealt with two main themes: a general worldwide pattern of imperial culture, and a historical experience of resistance against empire. He gave up the method of the genealogical analysis he employed in Orientalism, and combined culture directly with imperial practice instead. On the one hand, by examining the representative works of canonical writers in the West he emphasized the special status of their works while exposing their complicity with imperialism; on the other hand, he analyzed certain modes of resistance against imperialism and postcolonial powers in order to provide alternative methods for interpreting literary texts, colonial history and their interrelations.As founders of the field of postcolonial studies, Said, Bhabha and Spivak form'the holy trinity'of postcolonial theorists with a poststructuralist turn of mind. Both Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism are vital texts of postcolonial theory. His analyses of literary and political representation, the opposition between the metropolitan center and the colonial periphery, the figure of the exile and the position of writers in relation to their audiences and constituencies have all helped to define the field of postcolonial studies as a whole. Bhabha continues and goes beyond the colonial discourse analysis initiated by Said in Orientalism. Concerning the issue of colonial discourse, the difference between Bhabha and Said lies in that the former regards the discourse as contradictory and conflict-ridden, while the latter describes such a discourse as a monolithic and unified system in essence. Both Said and Spivak are concerned with the epistemic violence inflicted on the colonized countries by imperialism, and they both attempt to provide alternative accounts of the history of Europe's interaction with those countries it colonized and ruled. Their contributions to the postcolonial studies consist in the theorization of colonial discourse and the representation of women from non-Western world respectively. The two issues of positionality and complicity raised by the issue of representation become the common focus of Said, Bhabha and Spivak. Said and Spivak discuss the necessity of representing the underprivileged and the excluded, and they both acknowledge that intellectuals are influenced by their institutionalized role and position, and realize that the use of complicated theoretical models would limit the impact their work produce on wide audience. Unlike Said and Spivak, much of Bhabha's work is concerned with representation and location, especially in relation to the place of the subject in the hybrid postcolonial world. But he never explicitly discusses the problems of the postcolonial intellectual in representing others. Nor does he consider the ambiguity of his own position.Throughout his academic career of nearly 40 years, Said always tried to break confinement of any fixed discipline, profession and idea, and questioned and challenged the assumptions underlying particular disciplines, discourses, or cultural or critical practices. He attacked those totalizing and binary ideological systems or essentialist ideas and rejected such notions as those of purity-whether of race, religion or critical systems. He constantly defined his criticism as oppositional, but he tended to be skeptical of other critics who define themselves in similar fashions. For Said was opposed not just to dominant orthodoxies but also to those ahistorical and apolitical trends in contemporary criticism, and he tended to value the differences between his own work and that of other socially and politically committed critics more than the similarities. A consistent independence of thought is his most noticeable characteristic. He did not adhere explicitly to Marxism, nor did he identify himself with any political current or movement. His refusal of both the rarefied world of pure textuality and the ideologically impacted world of political dogma is the ground of his effort to go beyond the four basic forms of criticism: practical criticism, literary history, appreciation and interpretation and literary theory. The essence of his critical spirit is that he refused to be confined to any particular school, ideology, or a party, but on the contrary, he decided to take everything into his critical horizon, thus foregrounding openness and worldliness of his critical vision. His exploration of worldliness of both the text and the critic, Orientalism, culture and imperialism and the roles of intellectuals and their function of criticizing the society is of great significance to the enrichment and development of Chinese literary and cultural theories in the context of globalization.