A Study On Said’s Postcolonial Criticism

As the founder and representative of postcolonialism which comes to the theoretical stage in the1980s,Said plays an especially important role in it. The openness of his thought rouses heated discussion amongeast and west, and also makes it never old-fashioned. The content of his thought is very comprehensive,including gender, race, culture, literature, music and many other fields. In lots of studies on Said,researchers always prefer discussing his views on postcolonial culture, or applying his postcolonial terms totheir theoretical practice. Different from the above, this thesis is an attempt to find out his opinions aboutcultural criticism from his profound postcolonialism.Said’s cultural criticism is deep; the thesis consists of five parts and makes the study on it from fivedifferent angels. The first part deals with the foundation to form Said’s cultural criticism from the origin ofhis thoughts. The special growth forges his distinctive life experience, and the memory of his childhoodunder colony haunts him all his life, imposing him to regard himself as a wanderer, a marginalized, and atramp who watches and cogitates on the unequal world lonely. Chapter two is the humanism on Said’scultural criticism. Educated under pure western system centering on the concepts of humanism anddemocracy, Said considers literature as the text of reality with a hope to find out the correspondingrelationship between them. His humanism and democracy are not empty political slogans but a kind ofpractical personality of excellent cultural criticism. Chapter three is Said’s unique critical methods. Hecreates his cultural criticism in the light of humanism, and puts forward contrapuntal reading by combiningmusic theory and literary criticism. Chapter four argues that Said’s cultural criticism is tactical. Heconstructs secular literary criticism with literariness as its start and humanism as its center. Chapter fivedemonstrates the limitation of Said’s criticism. No theory is perfect, and the same is true of Said’s criticism.The closeness with politics, unprofessional interpretation in interdisciplinary and uncertainty of explanatorydegree are the challenging problems for Said’s postcolonial literary criticism to deal with.