The World, the Text, and the Critic by Edward Said
Published 1983 · 432 pages · 72,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is The World, the Text, and the Critic to read?
The World, the Text, and the Critic scores 67 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 68 out of 100
- Academic critical vocabulary without the technical density of poststructuralist theory; more accessible than Derrida or Jameson.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Abstraction: 76 out of 100
- Arguments about criticism and history are abstract but consistently grounded in specific texts and situations.
- Information density: 74 out of 100
- Dense with literary examples, theoretical positions, and historical argument.
- Narrative indirection: 16 out of 100
- Said builds his argument through sustained engagement with other critics; indirection in the polemical approach.
- Symbolic density: 14 out of 100
- Analytical and argumentative throughout.
- Ironic distance: 16 out of 100
- Said deploys irony against the political naivety of purely textual criticism.
- Resolution withholding: 12 out of 100
- Arguments are stated and developed to clear conclusions.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- Essay collection with a sustained polemic thread; essays are interconnected but each stands independently.
How The World, the Text, and the Critic is regarded
The World, the Text, and the Critic holds a literary regard score of 48 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.