Edward Said
# Edward Said

Edward William Said - Árabe: إدوارد سعيد - (Jerusalém, 1 de Novembro de 1935 -Nova Iorque, 25 de Setembro de 2003); foi um intelectual, crítico literário e activista da causa palestiniana.
    A teoria literária, seja da esquerda ou da direita, voltou as costas a essas coisas. Isso pode ser considerado, penso eu, o triunfo da ética do profissionalismo. Mas não é por acaso que o surgimento de tão estreitamente definida uma filosofia de pura textualidade e não-interferência crítica coincidiu com a ascendência do reaganismo.
       - The intellectual origins of literary theory in Europe were, I think it is accurate to say, insurrectionary. The traditional university, the hegemony of determinism and positivism, the reification of ideological bourgeois “humanism,” the rigid barriers between academic specialties: it was powerful responses to all these that linked together such influential progenitors of today’s literary theorist as Saussure, Lukács, Bataille, Lévi-Strauss, Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx. Theory proposed itself as a synthesis overriding the petty fiefdoms within the world of intellectual production, and it was manifestly to be hoped as a result that all the domains of human activity could be seen, and lived, as a unity. ...
       Literary theory, whether of the Left or the Right, has turned its back on these things. This can be considered, I think, the triumph of the ethic of professionalism. But it is no accident that the emergence of so narrowly defined a philosophy of pure textuality and critical noninterference has coincided with the ascendancy of Reaganism.
          - Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), pp. 3-4