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