Beginnings: Intention and MethodColumbia University Press, 1985 - 414 էջ A "beginning," especially as embodied in much modern thought, is its own method, Edward Said argues in this classic treatise on the role of the intellectual and the goal of criticism. Distinguishing between "origin," which is divine, mythical, and privileged, and "beginning," which is secular and humanly produced, Said traces the ramifications and diverse understandings of the concept of beginning through history. A beginning is a first step in the intentional production of meaning and the production of difference from preexisting traditions. It authorizes subsequent texts--it both enables them and limits what is acceptable. Drawing on the insights of Vico, Valery, Nietzsche, Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Husserl, and Foucault, Said recognizes the novel as the major attempt in Western literary culture to give beginnings an authorizing function in experience, art, and knowledge. Scholarship should see itself as a beginning--as a uniting of theory and practice. Said's insistence on a criticism that is humane and socially responsible is what makes Beginnings a book about much more than writing: it is about imagination and action as well as the constraints on freedom and invention that come from human intention and the method of its fulfillment. |
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action activity aesthetic authority autodidact Barthes become beginning called career chapter character complex concept Conrad consciousness continuity Costaguana course criticism Decoud describe discontinuity discourse divine dream Erich Auerbach essay example existence experience fact father fiction formal Foucault Freud Giambattista Vico Gould Heart of Darkness Hopkins human Ibid idea imaginative individual intention interpretation Interpretation of Dreams Joseph Conrad Jude the Obscure knowledge language Lévi-Strauss linguicity linguistic literary literature Mallarmé man's meaning method mind modern narrative nature Nietzsche Nostromo notion novel novelistic object original philology philosopher poem poet poetic possible present problem produced R. P. Blackmur radical reader reality relationships repetition Science seems sense signifies sort speaking statement structuralist structure Sulaco T. E. Lawrence temporal textual textual criticism things thought tradition trans truth unconscious University Press Valéry verbal Vico Vico's words writing