SAID, Edward, (1935-), literary critic and champion of Palestinian liberation. Born in Jerusalem in 1935, Said was educated at Victoria College, Cairo, Mount Hermon School, Massachusetts, and at Princeton and Harvard Universities. He has taught English at Columbia University since 1963 and is currently professor of English and comparative literature there. Said's Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978) broke was a landmark in both the study of literature and Western conceptions of the East. Said has written extensively on the Palestinian struggle for independence and served on the Palestine National Council. His writing are collected in The Politics of Disposession (1995). More recently he has criticised the terms of the Middle East Peace Process in Peace and Its Discontents (1995). His most recent work on literature is Culture and Imperialism.
Post-structuralism and post-modernism