The World, the Text, and the Critic was published by Harvard University Press in 1983, and it represents Said’s most sustained statement of his critical method. The title announces the program: literary criticism must attend not just to the text (the New Critics’ province) or to abstract theoretical systems (the deconstructionists’ territory) but to the world — the material, political, and social circumstances in which literature is created, circulated, and interpreted.
The book collects essays written over a decade, unified by Said’s argument for what he called “secular criticism” — a critical practice that refuses both the dogmatism of political ideologies and the aestheticism of formalist approaches. Said’s targets are multiple: he criticizes the New Criticism for treating texts as self-contained verbal icons, disconnected from history and politics; he criticizes deconstruction for dissolving texts into endless chains of signification that lead nowhere; and he criticizes Marxist criticism for reducing literature to an expression of class interests.
The most influential essays deal with what Said calls “affiliation” — the network of relationships that connect a text to its historical moment. Where traditional criticism emphasized “filiation” (the text’s relationship to its author and literary predecessors), Said argued for attention to “affiliation” — the text’s relationships to institutions, audiences, cultural systems, and power structures. This framework allowed him to read literature as both an aesthetic achievement and a social practice, without reducing it to either.
The essay on Jonathan Swift, the chapter on Conrad, and the theoretical arguments about criticism and culture represent Said at his most incisive. He writes with a clarity and force that distinguish him from the theoretical jargon that characterized much academic criticism of the period, and his insistence that criticism must engage with the real world — with politics, with power, with the material conditions of human existence — gave literary studies a moral seriousness it had been in danger of losing.
Collecting The World, the Text, and the Critic
First edition (Harvard University Press, 1983): Cloth, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $25–$60
- Later editions: $5–$15