Towards a Hermeneutics of Hope: The legacy of Edward W. Said

This paper focuses primarily on the later work of Said. After a brief review of what Said himself saw as formative events in his life it reviews the tradition of “philological hermeneutics” as Said himself defined it and within which he located his own work as a scholar. His key themes of intertextuality, post-colonialism, and receptivity/resistance are discussed as important elements linking that tradition to the particular style and substance of his political engagements. Finally, the paper returns to the question of Said's legacy as a possible contribution to our thinking about the purpose of humanistic scholarship and the role of the scholar-teacher as Said conceived it. His hermeneutics and his politics, it is argued, are all of a piece.