Abstract
It is commonly assumed that Edward Said’s privileging of the Oriental side of the East-West dichotomy in Western literary history has to do with his commitment to the Palestinian liberation struggle. Quite often, reference to Western politics in the Middle East undercuts his literary scholarship. His 1993 article “Nationalism, Human Rights, and Interpretation” is a case in point. In this article, Said starts by discussing Matthew Arnold’s cultural nationalism and fleetingly proves how Arnold constructs his hegemonic notion of “culture” and a “deeply authoritarian and uncompromising notion of the State.”1 He then devotes approximately half of the article to the discussion of the Palestinian conflict and the first Gulf War. This article is a perfect example of Said employing his disciplinary discourse to draw attention to the current urgencies for which he is taking responsibility.
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Notes
Said, Edward W., “Nationalism, Human Rights, and Interpretation,” Raritan 12.3 (1993), 27.
Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 66.
Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 28.
Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin, 1978), 20.
For a discussion on the Orientalization of European Jewry during the nineteenth century and Said’s ambivalence toward the topic, see Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek Jonathan Penslar, eds., Orientalism and the Jews (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2005).
Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993), 7.
Jacques Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” in Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 122.
Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Cambridge, UK: B. Blackwell, 1992).
Jacques Derrida, “Hostipitality,” in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 361–362.
Jacques Derrida, “Interpretations at War: Kant, the Jew, the German,” in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 138.
Edward Said, “Orientalism Once More,” Development and Change 35.5 (2004), 876.
Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of “the Jew” in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875–1945 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 13.
Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 17.
Donald D. Stone, “Matthew Arnold and the Pragmatics of Hebraism and Hellenism,” Poetics Today 19.2 (Summer 1998), 179.
Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma, an Essay towards a Better Apprehension of the Bible (London: Smith, Elder, 1883), 134.
See for example, Mary Ann Perkins in Coleridge’s Philosophy: The Logos as Unifying Principle (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
Jonathan Freedman, The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 50.
Lionel Trilling, Matthew Arnold (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 232.
Anthony Julius, T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 53; Freedman, The Temple of Culture, 192–195.
Aamir R. Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 39.
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© 2015 Robert T. Tally Jr.
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Tastekin, E. (2015). Orient Within, Orient Without: Said’s “Hostipitality” toward Arnoldian Culture. In: Tally, R.T. (eds) The Geocritical Legacies of Edward W. Said. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137487209_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137487209_3
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