Return to philology and humanism in Edward W. Said

Author(s)

Lucas de Jesus Santos

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem
• Defense date: 2016-12-01

Examining board members

Eduardo Sterzi; Arivaldo Sacramento de Souza; Alfredo Cesar Barbosa de Melo

• Advisor: Eduardo Sterzi

Abstract

This research deals with humanism and the proposal of return to Philology of Edward W. Said. We chose to segment the research in three stages: first, the approach of the saidian notion of Worldliness, according to which texts, authors, secular institutions are part of a mundane sphere, which produces and is made through human textual expressions. In order to trace the contours of the concept, it is invested in a triangulation between the Palestinian-American intellectual, Giambattista Vico and Erich Auerbach, arguing that they form a mundanelike field of reflection, enabling Said to address the problems and alternative solutions for his treatment of Philology and Humanism. The Worldliness works, for Said, as a kind of ontology of the secular world and above all as the decisive condition for ethical action. In a second stage, we address more specifically the issue of Philology. Starting from the critique of racist and religious conceptions of Philology and its influence on the formation of Literary Studies, we argue that Said saw Philology as an ethics of reading, a form of intervention in the secular arena of human textuality. In this sense, we propose the existence of two ethical dimensions related to Philology: an oppositional ethics and an enabling ethics: the first one concerns a resistance vector involving all interpretation; the second refers to the ability of reading to build new intertextual, inter-institutional and political relations, without resorting to the methods of fixing or reproducible forms of interpretation. Third, it is attended the theme of Humanism. Humanism is approached in a historical perspective, accentuating its simultaneous emergence with the colonialist enterprise of Europe, demonstrating the sharing of onto-epistemological assumptions between Humanism and Colonialism, and how both systems of thought forged a fixed image of an universal human. Then it is dealt with the critique of Frantz Fanon to this intertwining, due to the fact that his arguments have been of substantial importance to the renewed vision of Said on Humanism. By approaching these discussions about this issue, it is discussed how the universal human image was inherited by the American higher education system, and how the discussions on the humanities curriculum were marked by purity injunctions of the human figure. Finally, it is argued that the Humanism pleaded by Said is, unlike the previous one, open to social, cultural, and political changings and sensitive to the demands of the peoples and populations that began increasingly strongly to demand their rights and to mark their presence in the political and cultural scene. In this sense, we argue that Said's Humanism has a cosmopolitan sense, but not on a base of ideas of belonging and fixity required by illuminist cosmopolitanism. The cosmopolitan humanism of Said is exilic and in constant shifting, not allowing any form of limiting stability or placating synthesis. Finally, we conclude by proposing an enlargement of the possibilities of Humanism and Philology in contemporaneity, by making them face the problem of the Anthropocene and terrestrial climate change. We believe that, as Said proposed to any form of academic expression, it is essential to think of them under the new settings of humanity and worldness that come contemporaneously (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 14/04757-1 - Return to philology and humanism in Edward Said
• Grantee: Lucas de Jesus Santos
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master