Reflections on Exile and Other EssaysWith 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. |
From inside the book
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... irony of " errant souls [ adventuring ] in an inessential , empty reality , " or that of speaking " of past gods and gods ... to come " but never of what is present , or " the irony [ which ] has to seek the only world that is adequate ...
... irony ) from the early expressionist works to the late dodecaphonic mas- terpieces . As if affectionately recalling and then angrily refuting Lukács , Adorno describes the twelve - tone method in terms taken almost ver- batim from the ...
... Irony , with intuitive double vision , can see where God is to be found in a world abandoned by God ... Irony ... is the highest freedom that can be achieved in a world without God . That is why it is not only the sole possible a priori ...
Contents
The Essays | 1 |
Sense and Sensibility | 15 |
Amateur of the Insoluble | 24 |
Copyright | |
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