Beginnings: Intention and Method

by Edward W. Said

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 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, Literary Criticism, Theory, Criticism

414 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

(Arabic Profile إدوارد سعيد)
Edward Wadie Said was a professor of literature at Columbia University, a public intellectual, and a founder of the academic field of postcolonial studies. A Palestinian American born in Mandatory Palestine, he was a citizen of the United States by way of his father, a U.S. Army veteran.

Educated in the Western canon, at British and American schools, Said applied his education and bi-cultural perspective to illuminating the gaps of cultural and political understanding between the Western world and the Eastern world, especially about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East; his principal influences were Antonio Gramsci, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Michel Foucault, and Theodor Adorno.

As a cultural critic, Said is known for the book Orientalism (1978), a critique of the cultural representations that are the bases of Orientalism—how the Western world perceives the Orient. Said’s model of textual analysis transformed the academic discourse of researchers in literary theory, literary criticism, and Middle-Eastern studies—how academics examine, describe, and define the cultures being studied. As a foundational text, Orientalism was controversial among the scholars of Oriental Studies, philosophy, and literature.

As a public intellectual, Said was a controversial member of the Palestinian National Council, because he publicly criticized Israel and the Arab countries, especially the political and cultural policies of Muslim régimes who acted against the national interests of their peoples. Said advocated the establishment of a Palestinian state to ensure equal political and human rights for the Palestinians in Israel, including the right of return to the homeland. He defined his oppositional relation with the status quo as the remit of the public intellectual who has “to sift, to judge, to criticize, to choose, so that choice and agency return to the individual” man and woman.

In 1999, with his friend Daniel Barenboim, Said co-founded the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra, based in Seville, which comprises young Israeli, Palestinian, and Arab musicians. Besides being an academic, Said also was an accomplished pianist, and, with Barenboim, co-authored the book Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (2002), a compilation of their conversations about music. Edward Said died of leukemia on 25 September 2003.

Reviews

[Kyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

A window into a more literate past, where scholars across discipline had a working knowledge of such diverse texts as Oedipus and Ulysses, Seven Pillars of Wisdom as well as Koran, Vico’s New Science and Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams plus Dickens’ Great Expectations and Foucault’s gamut of discourse. As a book that ultimately asks scholars “where to begin?” a more contemporary question perhaps should be “who has time to read when faced with the blank word processing screen?” Intriguingly, Said’s early magnum opus was published the same year as the Spielberg’s modern summer blockbuster Jaws and I would correlate the decline and rise of various media: who would go through the trouble of tracing out the history of western critical thinking when you can probably become a tenured professor now espousing on the fake Latin used by child wizards or the costume choices of spider and iron men? Still an important journey to take, but there is little chance of me starting a YouTube channel to deconstruct this text, other than making a drinking game out of the many typographical corrections pencilled into this edition.

[Nazmiye Gül · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cleaver and scalpel. What a wonderful devotion of a huge master to fact and fiction.

[Yalena]

This has been a promising but unfortunately very disappointing read. Play-pretend erudition disguises how underwhelming its theses are. It's poor style to cite others to hide the fact one has nothing to say!

One can't help but think that the subject matter requires us to break from the 'standard' academic form to prospect it? For example, rather than establishing a distinction between beginning and origin from the outset, it seems so obvious a better method would be to gently disambiguate the terms with focused discernment on why they are closely binded. Then, to show a reader why this is a serious oversight. (In the first place, however, the distinction, as Said formulates it, completely ignores that the laïcitisation of intellectual life has always been partial, incomplete, etc.)

What could have been a wonderful critique of genealogical historiographies/genetic explanation really becomes pointless. It's not a bad book, you can find something worthwhile now and again. But over all, so completely... underwhelming. Perhaps this is too harsh but I could not help but feel this way since I regarded the author so well when I was younger.

[Brumaire Bodbyl-Mast · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel as if this book is a bit beyond my level in terms of the breadth of canon it covers, and it is also very much a theoretically dense work, largely focusing on the very abstract concept of beginnings in literature (and not even necessarily just that, as the discussions can get a bit convoluted, getting into the question of authorial integrity and originality based on the concept of beginning, starting with Genesis and God as a basis.) Said was very much an academic whose breed has gone extinct, it is incredibly difficult to find a text like this written after the 90s, and as such it is endlessly invaluable in teaching a more in-depth form of literary criticism that is far less lacking than its modern, poppy comparison. Yet, it can prove very difficult to follow, with Said jumping between books in the canon and becoming ever more abstracted from the concept of a straight beginning in a novel, often veering into summaries. Some of the more interesting aspects of the book are his discussion of Islamic culture and why the novel was viewed as unnecessary, and also his discussion of Lawrence of Arabia as a man who turned the page into reality and then vice versa. I should note, though, that my comprehension of this book was seriously harmed by personal circumstances, as I am presently on a study abroad.

[Bigpapa44 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is so hard to understand totally. but I highly recommend you to read it even just quickly read through it.