Said’s Impact: Lessons for Literary Critics

Abstract

Very few literary critics can expect their work to have the sort of impact achieved by Edward Said. He positioned Orientalism, his best-known book, against ‘an implicit consensus [...] building up for the past decade in which the study of literature is considered to be profoundly, even constitutively nonpolitical,’ and lamented the fact that literary critics tended to apply their techniques only to strictly literary objects.¹ If that consensus was real, Orientalism, published in 1978, helped shatter it. Said’s angry critique of Western attitudes toward the East has been widely and enduringly influential, and not only because his topic had evident political gravity. The book also set an example methodologically. Others could take inspiration from Said’s willingness to break through disciplinary boundaries, and could adapt Said’s concept of ‘Orientalism’ to launch a critique of, say, ‘Africanism,’ drawing in diverse situations and materials. A significant amount of the activity inspired by Orientalism has accordingly taken place outside the literary-critical realm, and a fair proportion of it outside universities. And that dimension of the book’s legacy is tied to its own fundamental impetus to link academic and literary materials with, and in some important sense give priority to, a wider world of politics and conflict.

[T]here is a mind of society, and it is this mind that we address, tutor, doctor, inform, evaluate, criticize, reform. Our role is highly mediated and subtle, insidious even, but as a class of people our impact on the on-going life of society in its day-to- day and even long-term affairs is very diffuse, hence minimal.

(Edward Said on literary critics/ teachers of literature, 1976)