ABSTRACT

Edward Said has never left any doubt as to the significance he attaches to what he calls secular criticism. It is by this term, not postcolonial criticism, that he identifies his critical practice as a whole. The meaning of this term is a theme he has returned to repeatedly since first elaborating it at length in the introduction to The World, the Text, and the Critic. But this facet of the Saidian project has received nothing like the attention that, for instance, has been lavished upon the concept of Orientalism or the strategy of what he calls contrapuntal reading. Nor does it seem to have been productive for younger scholars in quite the same way as these two latter conceptual constellations. There may even appear to be something odd about the persistence of this concern in Said’s work, at least within the context of the Anglo-American academy. Could all this conceptual and rhetorical energy and all this ethical seriousness really be directed at literary readings of the Bible or at works concerning the traditions of Judeo-Christian hermeneutics, as a few stray comments towards the end of The World, the Text, and the Critic might lead one to believe?