Synopses & Reviews
With their powerful blend of political and aesthetic concerns, Edward W. Said's writings have transformed the field of literary studies. This long-awaited collection of literary and cultural essays, the first since Harvard University Press published
The World, the Text, and the Critic in 1983, reconfirms what no one can doubt--that Said is the most impressive, consequential, and elegant critic of our time--and offers further evidence of how much the fully engaged critical mind can contribute to the reservoir of value, thought, and action essential to our lives and our culture.
As in the title essay, the widely admired "Reflections on Exile," the fact of his own exile and the fate of the Palestinians have given both form and the force of intimacy to the questions Said has pursued. Taken together, these essays--from the famous to those that will surprise even Said's most assiduous followers--afford rare insight into the formation of a critic and the development of an intellectual vocation. Said's topics are many and diverse, from the movie heroics of Tarzan to the machismo of Ernest Hemingway to the shades of difference that divide Alexandria and Cairo. He offers major reconsiderations of writers and artists such as George Orwell, Giambattista Vico, Georg Lukacs, R. P. Blackmur, E. M. Cioran, Naguib Mahfouz, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, Walter Lippman, Samuel Huntington, Antonio Gramsci, and Raymond Williams. Invigorating, edifying, acutely attentive to the vying pressures of personal and historical experience, his book is a source of immeasurable intellectual delight.
Review
Edward Said may be the world's most famous English professor, and its most famous Palestinian after Yasir Arafat...Said turned 65 last year, having survived a life-threatening disease of the blood diagnosed nearly a decade ago. It is not surprising, therefore, that his recent publications have taken a retrospective turn...His latest book, Reflections on Exile--a monumental collection of essays spanning his 35 year career at Columbia University--is another result of his effort to impose thematic unity on his wide-ranging intellectual life.
Review
Said's work has been transformative...[Reflections on Exileis] indispensable for all college and university libraries.
Review
The collection will serve as an ideal primer in the evolution of a critical position that established [Said's] international reputation--and gained him some fierce opponents--as a leading intellectual voice in the humanities
One of the many pleasures of this volume lies in Said's command of the personal essay
This collection contains a variety of essays that equally display his aesthetic refinement, his comparative perspective, his interdisciplinary spirit, and his ideological conviction.
Review
For more than a third of a century, Columbia University professor Said has written insightfully about literature, culture, and the Middle East. This volume gathers nearly 50 essays, most on literary subjects, although Said also addresses philosophy and history, the arts and current events. Mary Carroll
Review
Said's work has been transformative...[Reflections on Exileis] indispensable for all college and university libraries.
Review
A compilation of 35 years' worth of critical essays from one of the boldest and most articulate cultural theorists alive today. For those who know Said foremost as an outspoken and controversial advocate of Palestine, the breadth of intellectual curiosity and erudition manifest in these collected works will come as a pleasant surprise. Not until halfway through the anthology is there any mention of Palestine, and even in those essays that deal with his homeland, the author uses his unparalleled knowledge of the subject to illustrate larger points about anthropology, human rights, or nationalism...Said demonstrates that he is indeed a modern teacher and critic of the highest order...And yet, even the least political of his essays further his goal: to deprive us of our complacency by reminding us again and again that all knowledge is mediated by power, and no one is immune to its balance...Fascinating. Kirkus Reviews
Review
Said views all of culture through the lens of 'historical experience,' emphasizing how feminism, ethnic and minority experience, and nationalism have broken tradition's grip on literature...Given his keenly penetrating and original cast of mind, it is not surprising that Said's personal pantheon of heroes includes those who blur the line between criticism and creation, among them Foucault, Nietzsche, Gramsci, Barthes, Adorno, and John Berger, not to mention pianist Glenn Gould, composer and conductor Pierre Boulez and filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo...This wide-ranging and brilliant collection is a fitting tribute to one of our leading scholars, who has changed the way we look at Western culture. Publishers Weekly
Review
As these essays make clear, Said is engaged on a quest to connect what people want with the way they must live, even if that means discovering that the two ways are sometimes irreconcilable. His is a passionate strategy...[The essays are] little lamps that light up the great tangled forest of literature and philosophy. Booklist
Review
The collection, much more than the sum of its parts, is the portrait of an exemplary intellectual life, in which rigor and clarity join with courage and commitment, and both with a rare kind of unswerving joy at the complex face of reality...This is surely a major work, among the most provocative and cogent accounts of culture and the humanities that America has produced in recent years. Said's essays have a remarkable unity of position, given their temporal range. They contain no major swervings, no apologies--only a gradual maturing of his best insights, as they are applied to changing circumstances in politics and the academy...If there is a change in Said's thinking, it is perhaps a subtle shift toward greater hopefulness. David Kirby - San Francisco Chronicle
Synopsis
This long-awaited collection of literary and cultural essays, the first since Harvard University Press published The World, the Text, and the Critic in 1983, reconfirms that Edward Said is the most impressive, consequential, and elegant critic of our time. Taken together, these essays-- from the famous to those that will surprise even Said's most assiduous followers--afford rare insight into the formation of a critic and the development of an intellectual vocation.
About the Author
Edward W. Said was University Professor at Columbia University.
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Labyrinth of Incarnations: The Essays of Maurice Merleau-Ponty
2. Sense and Sensibility
On R. P. Blackmur, Georges Poulet, and E. D. Hirsc
3. Amateur of the Insoluble
On E. M. Cioran
4. A Standing Civil War
On T. E. Lawrence
5. Arabic Prose and Prose Fiction after 1948
6. Between Chance and Determinism: Lukàcs's Aesthetik
7. Conrad and Nietzsche
8. Vico on the Discipline of Bodies and Texts
9. Tourism among the Dogs
On George Orwell
10. Bitter Dispatches from the Third World
11. Grey Eminence
On Walter Lippmann
12. Among the Believers
On V. S. Naipaul
13. Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community
14. Bursts of Meaning
On John Berger and Jean Mohr
15. Egyptian Rites
16. The Future of Criticism
17. Reflections on Exile
18. Michel Foucault, 1927-1984
19. Orientalism Reconsidered
20. Remembrances of Things Played: Presence and Memory in the Pianist's Art
On Glenn Gould
21. How Not to Get Gored
On Ernest Hemingway
22. Foucault and the Imagination of Power
23. The Horizon of R. P. Blackmur
24. Cairo Recalled: Growing Up in the Cultural Crosscurrents of 1940s Egypt
25. Through Gringo Eyes: With Conrad in Latin America
26. The Quest for Gillo Pontecorv
27. Representing the Colonized: Anthropology's Interlocutors
28. After Mahfouz
29. Jungle Calling
On Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan
30. Cairo and Alexandria
31. Homage to a Belly-Dancer
On Tahia Carioca
32. Introduction to Moby-Dick
33. The Politics of Knowledge
34. Identity, Authority, and Freedom: The Potentate and the Traveler
35. The Anglo-Arab Encounter
On Ahdaf Soueif
36. Nationalism, Human Rights, and Interpretation
37. Traveling Theory Reconsidered
38. History, Literature, and Geography
39. Contra Mundum
On Eric Hobsbawm
40. Bach's Genius, Schumann's Eccentricity, Chopin's Ruthlessness, Rosen's Gift
41. Fantasy's Role in the Making of Nations
On Jacqueline Rose
42. On Defiance and Taking Positions
43. From Silence to Sound and Back Again: Music, Literature, and History
44. On Lost Causes
45. Between Worlds
46. The Clash of Definitions
On Samuel Huntington
Notes
Credits
Index