Summary
In the Introduction to Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, the phrase Said uses throughout for an opening away from the formal and technical toward the lived, the contested and the immediate, whose exclusion by twentieth-century formalist criticism his essays work to reverse (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.24).
Details
- The dominant style of twentieth-century criticism — Lukács, Eliot, Frye, Burke, White — is marked, in Said’s account, by a pretty constant hostility to historical experience, establishing distance between the creative powers of mind through language and immediate history (PDF p.12-14).
- Feminist criticism, the new Irish reading of Joyce, and ethnic and minority testimonial breach that consensus by integrating experiences long left unacknowledged, supremely in Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark (PDF p.14-17).
- Historical experience, in particular the experience of dislocation, exile, migration and empire, opens both professionalized jargon and “traditional” scholarship to the invigorating presence of a banished or forgotten reality that has dominated human existence in the past two hundred years (PDF p.25).
- The liberation movements’ notion of historical experience acknowledged that dominant and subaltern peoples in imperialism shared the same irreducibly secular world, and only one worldly cultural space, the common possession of all humankind (PDF p.21-22).
Related pages
Exile, Worldliness, Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays