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العنوان
Otherness in Edward Said Postcolonial Theory /
المؤلف
Elshikh, Asmaa Abdel Salam.
هيئة الاعداد
باحث / Asmaa Abdel Salam Elshikh
مشرف / Ibrahim Maghraby
الموضوع
Politics and literature. Criticism - Political aspects. Critics - Political activity. Intellectuals - Political activity.
تاريخ النشر
2008.
عدد الصفحات
vii-xii, 158 p. ;
اللغة
الإنجليزية
الدرجة
الدكتوراه
التخصص
الأدب والنظرية الأدبية
تاريخ الإجازة
1/1/2008
مكان الإجازة
جامعة المنيا - كلية الألسن - English
الفهرس
Only 14 pages are availabe for public view

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Abstract

The current thesis takes up for its task studying Said’s method of analyzing and confronting shapes of “otherness” in colonizer-colonized discursive relationship. Obviously, the problematic of otherness discussed in this sense is mainly cultural and social rather than philosophical and existential. The study raises the proposal that Said’s analysis of “otherness” is based on two axes, the epistemological and the psychological. The study also proposes that these two axes are what determine Said’s method of resistance. The third proposal is that Said’s work in itself offers a model of resistance directed against all the shapes of “otherness” which affect the objectivity of the intellectual’s work.
The study falls into four chapters preceded with a preface and followed with a conclusion and a bibliography. The first chapter in an introductory, devoted to shed light on the meaning of “otherness” as tackled in the context of this thesis. It introduces for the connotations, meaning and philosophical roots of the concept of “otherness”. The chapter also reflects on the development of the concept from Hegel and Marx to the present postcolonial theory through other theories specifically psychoanalysis.
The second chapter tackles one of the two axes on which Said establishes his method of analyzing the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized and between the author and his subject. It is by analyzing and criticizing “otherness” in its epistemological context. The chapter is thus concerned with “otherness” as a product from the relation between knowledge and power. It handles Said’s most direct and famous criticism of institutional and essential knowledge as the generative power of “otherness”. Otherness, in this sense, is generated through epistemological strategies like historicism and anthropology. So, history, geography, and language are considered by Said as the most important epistemological levels on which otherness is created.
The third chapter moves to the second axe of Said’s method of analyzing “otherness” in the West/East, colonizer/colonized, intellectual/object relationship. The chapter moves to the psychological level, or strategies, of “otherness” as analyzed by Said. Far from the common perception of Said’s work as being detached from the postcolonial attitude of resorting to psychoanalysis, this chapter proposes that Said’s work makes no little use of psychoanalysis. Said even detects some psychical strategies in the relation of “otherness” like identification, self affirmation, and self fortification. Said also relates these strategies to some psychic motifs like narcissism, paranoia, hysteria, and xenophobia.
The fourth chapter moves to Said’s method of resisting otherness. It thus accomplishes Said’s attitude towards otherness; an attitude which does not end up just at raising a problematic in its epistemological or psychological contexts. The fourth chapter proposes that Said’s theorization of “otherness” is bound up with the possibility of resistance to it. This possibility is based on the same two axes on which Said analyze and detects otherness: epistemology and psychology.