An Appetite to Begin: Intention and (Post)structuralism in Edward Said’s Critical Writing from Beginnings Onward

Michael R. Griffiths, University of Wollongong

This talk will explore the early ideas of Palestinian literary critic Edward Said on intentionality (or what he called “beginning”) from his work in the early 1970s and connect it to the long durée of his work. Said’s later statements about post-structuralism and its apolitical dimension are well known. What has been less well explored, however, is the complexity of Said’s earliest engagement with structuralism and post-structuralism as he seemingly paradoxically moved to emphasise an intentionalist position in literary interpretation. Said’s work in the early 1970s, then, signals an emergent critique of (post)structuralism’s rejection of authorial imprint, critical reception and the role of the context that circulates around texts, implying their agency and meaning in the world. The chapter from which the book is drawn is part of a wider book project called Decolonizing the Death of the Author, a study of the way global literatures have engaged with, critiqued, and even adopted the lessons and limitations of the poststructuralist critique of that most fetishised and also reviled of figures: the author. From the emergence and intensification of such responses to the postulate of the author’s deathly absence from the text, this book then moves to explore a series of case studies in postcolonial writing and writing from Indigenous writers in settler colonies that respond to the legacy of this postulate up to and including recent novels and poetry.

Michael R. Griffiths is Senior Lecturer in English Literatures at the University of Wollongong. He is the author of The Distribution of Settlement: Appropriation and Refusal in Australian Literature and Culture (UWAP 2018) and his essays have appeared in Textual Practice, Settler Colonial Studies, Discourse, Postcolonial Studies, Australian Humanities Review and many other venues including the Cambridge of the Australian Novel and the Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel. Griffiths edited the book Biopolitics and Memory in Postcolonial Literature and Culture (Ashgate 2016). He also coedited a special issue with Bruno Cornellier of Settler Colonial Studies titled: “Globalising Unsettlement” and, with Tanja Dreher, a special issue of Continuum which offered an account of freedom of speech debates in the late liberal world and was reprinted as a book in 2021.

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