Reading and Interpretation: Said's 'Secular Criticism' (Ziad Elmarsafy)

Dr Ziad Elmarsafy will chair the second meeting of the ‘Reading and Interpretation’ group, looking at Edward Said’s essay ‘Secular Criticism’ from The World, the Text, and the Critic.

Reading and Interpretation: Getting Over Freud is a discussion group for staff and postgraduate students interested in questions about how we read literature.

This series of seminars will look at contemporary writers, such as Martin Hägglund and Adam Phillips, who have challenged our strategies of reading and ways of interpreting everything from death and dreams to sex and selfhood. The focus of discussion will be topics such as: should we read for surface or for depth? Does a text have an unconscious? And do texts say what they mean or mean what they say? We might all be reading after Freud, but the thinkers this series will explore are all getting one over, getting out from under, or getting (a leg) over Freudian modes of interpretation.

Dr. Ziad Elmarsafy (York) is the author of The Enlightenment Qur’an (2009) and Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel (2012), and co-editor of Debating Orientalism (2013) and the forthcoming collection What Postcolonial Theory Doesn’t Say.

For copies of the reading or full details of the group and scheduled meetings, visit our webpage, or contact Alex Alonso or Doug Battersby.