"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."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), pp. 3-4
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Postmodernism
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Postmodernism
25 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Postmodernism →
Related Quotes
"The idea of the postmodern ... was in one way or another an appanage of the right. ... For Lyotard the very parameter…"
"Postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promis…"
"At the end of a life spent in the pursuit of knowledge Faust has to confess: "I now see that we can nothing know." Th…"
"The final dismantling of the great master narratives is itself a grand narrative—why else would people get so excited…"
"For about a couple of decades I've had a very simple question that I've been posing to my postmodern friends: "Can yo…"
"There is an obscurum per obscurius problem as well. In order to know whether or not giraffes are taller than ants we …"
"Is it easier to know what our culture’s epistemic norms are in terms of which it is to be determined whether or not g…"
"Postmodernism has found full political and social realisation. Recent years have taught us a bitter truth – namely, t…"
"Thinking about my own sense of identity, I realise that it has always depended on the fact of being a migrant. ... No…"
"Surely at least some of our logical principles … are far more evident and obvious to us than are any of the empirical…"