Blackwell Reference Online

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(1935-) Literary and cultural theorist. Born in Jerusalem, Palestine, Edward Said attended schools in Jerusalem, Cairo, and Massachusetts, and since 1963 has been Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Since Said's first book, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966), his thinking has embraced three broad imperatives: first, to articulate the cultural position and task of the intellectual and critic. Said's formulations in this area, influenced by F oucault , provided a crucial impetus to the N ew HISTORICISM in the 1980s, which was in part a reaction against the tendency of American adherents of S tructuralism and P oststructuralism to isolate literature from its various contexts or to reduce those contexts to an indiscriminate “textuality.” Said's second concern has been to examine Western D iscourses about the Orient in general and Islam in particular. His own origin has defined a third, more immediately political commitment: to bring to light the Palestinian struggle to regain a homeland. Some regard him as a model of the politically engaged scholar, while others view his enterprise as incoherent. Rather than follow a strictly chronological pattern, this account of Said's work will pursue the three lines indicated above. In Beginnings (1975) Said adapts insights from the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico's New Science ... log in or subscribe to read full text