ABSTRACT
After the formalist aberrations and disorientations of too many versions of poststructuralism and deconstruction, Edward Said, from The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983) to Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2003), highlighted the potential of a humanist criticism and of humanism as a critical practice. This chapter offers the first discussion of the relationship between Said and Rorty. Both are humanists and both intend to return criticism to the world. However, the author argues that by discussing the differences between their versions of humanism, one might be in a better position to illuminate the contours of a contemporary pragmatist humanism. For Said criticism is a cognitive activity and a form of knowledge that seeks to unmask the intimate relationship between epistemology and ideology, whereas for Rorty criticism ought to elucidate how novels can be helpful in our attempts at self-creation and self-overcoming and how they call attention to forms of cruelty and egotism hitherto unnoticed. This chapter concentrates on the question of whether the Rortyan version of a pragmatist literary criticism, which centers on terms such as redescription, hope, self-creation, inspiration, and creativity, can learn something from the Saidian notions of resistance and oppositional criticism. Is it, in other words, possible to use Said’s mediation between his Vichian insight that human beings can know only what they have made and his understanding of secular criticism as oppositional for the development of a pragmatist humanism?
