East West Dichotomy in Orientalism by Edward Syed

Abstract

Edward Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935, and moved to Egypt with his family at the time of partition in 1947. He attended secondary school in the United States and took his first degree at Princeton, where he studied with the distinguished critic R. P. Blackmur. Said went on to receive a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Harvard. From 1963 until his death he taught at Columbia University. He won the Lionel Trilling Award for his second book, Beginnings (1975), and became Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and then university professor. From the late 1970s until 1991, Said was a member of the Palestinian National Council. He helped to bring about the formation of the Palestinian National Initiative, founded in 2002 as a democratic opposition movement in Palestinian politics. Often attacked in the British and American press for his stance on Palestine, Said also had the distinction of seeing his writings banned by Yasir Arafat’s administration for their critical and independent line of thought. Said often insisted that it was the intellectual’s task to “speak truth to power,” and he did so fearlessly and tirelessly, whatever the power in question was.

Said’s early work in literature was strongly connected to European philology and philosophy. He translated Erich Auerbach, who would always remain one of his scholarly heroes, and Lukács, to who’s austere thought he was also in many ways faithful. Said’s first book (1966), on Joseph Conrad, took from phenomenology the idea of a writer’s career as a project, not merely a series of books and successes (or failures), but an attempt to shape that series into an implied story where life and work reach a new intelligibility. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Said was an important figure in bringing major European literary and cultural theorists to the attention of the American academy, and lectured and wrote regularly on the recent writings of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and many others. Much of this material, often in dialogue with the older European intellectual traditions, which also fascinated Said, found its way into Beginnings, and into The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), which included elements of the Christian Gauss Seminars Said had given at Princeton a year or two before. Later, Said was attracted to the musical and philosophical criticism of T. W. Adorno, and once said, jokingly, that he was “the only true follower of Adorno.” The remark obliquely catches much of what is important about Said’s own work. He wasn’t a “follower”of Adorno (or anyone), but he did believe, like Adorno, in the relentless posing of difficult questions. Uninterrupted thought itself, Said quotes Adorno as saying, is “insatiable,” and “rejects the foolish wisdom of resignation.” Much of Said’s later literary work is gathered in the complex and wide-ranging volume Reflections on Exile (2000).