Summary
Critic whose death the occasion commemorating him frames essay 16, “The Future of Criticism”, and whom Said names among the pioneers who brought other disciplines into dialogue with literary interpretation (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.173, p.176).
Details
- Essay 16 was proposed for the occasion commemorating Donato’s sad death; his major theme was the irrecoverability of history and the melancholy inevitability of representation as memory, literature and prophecy, and the bond between what he did and who he was cannot be reproduced, codified or transmitted as “criticism” tout court (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.173).
- His work was essentially of the oppositional kind: a salutary intransigence whose function is radically secular, investigative and relentlessly mobile, as against systematic or doctrinal modes that solidify criticism as a packaged commodity (PDF p.176).
- Thanks to pioneers like Donato, philosophy, linguistics, psychoanalysis, sociology and anthropology are in fruitful dialogue with the hermeneutic and philological practice of interpreting literary texts (PDF p.176).
- Readers of Donato’s astringent critiques of romantic disillusionment may see the choice tying an image of a non-dominative future to critical praxis, drawn from Adorno and Raymond Williams at the essay’s close, as logically entailed by those critiques (PDF p.179).
Related pages
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Edward Said, Raymond Williams