Zitate von Edward Said
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Edward Said
Geburtstag: 1. November 1935
Todesdatum: 25. September 2003
Edward William Said, eigentlich Edward Wadie Saïd , war ein US-amerikanischer Literaturtheoretiker und -kritiker palästinensischer Herkunft. Die britische Tageszeitung Guardian zählt Saids Buch Orientalismus zu den hundert bedeutendsten Sachbüchern. Er galt als Fürsprecher der Palästinenser in den USA.
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Zitate Edward Said
„The prevailing situation of criticism… has given rise to a cult of professional expertise whose effect in general is pernicious. For the intellectual class, expertise has usually been a service rendered, and sold, to the central authority of society. This is the trahison des clercs of which Julien Benda spoke in the 1920s. Expertise in foreign affairs, for example, has usually meant the legitimization of the conduct of foreign policy and, what is more to the point, a sustained investment in revalidating the role of experts in foreign affairs. The same sort of thing is true of literary critics and professional humanists, except that their expertise is based upon noninterference in what Vico grandly calls the world of nations but which prosaically might just as well be called “the world.” We tell our students and our general constituency that we defend the classics, the virtues of a liberal education, and the precious pleasures of literature even as we also show ourselves to be silent (perhaps incompetent) about the historical and social world in which all these things take place…. Humanists and intellectuals accept the idea that… cultural types are not supposed to interfere in matters for which the social system has not certified them.“
— Edward Said
The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), pp. 2-3
„As an Egyptian of Palestinian origin teaching English literature at an American university, who had built his scholarly career on a Polish sailor that became an English writer (Joseph Conrad), Said’s assertion that western orientalists could not comprehend the East and easterners because they were born into a different culture, seems somewhat bizarre.“
— Edward Said
Yoav Gelber, Nation and History: Israeli Historiography between Zionism and Post-Zionism (London and Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2011), p. 56
„The history of other cultures is non-existent until it erupts in confrontation with the United States.“
— Edward Said, buch Culture and Imperialism
Culture and Imperialism (1993), Chap 4, Sect 2
„Theory is taught so as to make the student believe that he or she can become a Marxist, a feminist, an Afrocentrist, or a deconstructionist with about the same effort and commitment required in choosing items from a menu.“
— Edward Said, buch Culture and Imperialism
Culture and Imperialism (1993), Chap 4, Sect 2
