ABSTRACT
It does not matter whether one generation applauds the previous genera tion or hisses it-in either event, it carries the previous generation within itself.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
My title alludes to an essay by Edward Said in which he engaged “in a useful exercise, by which one delineates the critical field in order to propose changes in it or lacks in it” (Said 1983,140). In a fundamental way, Said’s Orien talism (1978) was a similar exercise concerned as it was with the necessity for members of an academic community to struggle constantly for critical distance on their own work. As Said warned at the end of Orientalism, “Trouble sets in when the guild tradition of Orientalism [or any academic field] takes over the scholar who is not vigilant, whose individual consciousness as a scholar is not on guard against idees regues all too easily handed down in the profession” (326).
