Digital Commons Network^™

In his essay "Opponents, Audiences, Constitutencies, and Community," Edward W. Said throws down a gage to literary theorists and challenges them to break out of disciplinary ghettos, "to reopen the blocked social processes ceding objective representations (hence power) of the world to a small coterie of experts and their clients, to consider that the audience for literacy is not a closed circle of three thousand professional critics but the community of human beings living in society..." To the literary critic he admonishes:

Whe you discuss Keats or Shakespeare or Dickens, you may touch on political subjects, of course, but it …