Reflections on Exile and Other Essays

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Harvard University Press, 2000 - Biography & Autobiography - 617 pages

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.

 

Contents

Labyrinth of Incarnations The Essays of Maurice MerleauPonty
1
Sense and Sensibility
15
Amateur of the Insoluble
24
A Standing Civil War
31
Arabic Prose and Prose Fiction After 1948
41
Between Chance and Determinism Lukacss Aesthetik
61
Conrad and Nietzsche
70
Vico on the Discipline of Bodies and Texts
83
The Quest for Gillo Pontecorvo
282
Representing the Colonized Anthropologys Interlocutors
293
After Mahfouz
317
Jungle Calling
327
Cairo and Alexandria
337
Homage to a BellyDancer
346
Introduction to MobyDick
356
The Politics of Knowledge
372

Tourism among the Dogs
93
Bitter Dispatches from the Third World
98
Grey Eminence
105
Among the Believers
113
Opponents Audiences Constituencies and Community
118
Bursts of Meaning
148
Egyptian Rites
153
The Future of Criticism
165
Reflections on Exile
173
Michel Foucault 19271984
187
Orientalism Reconsidered
198
Remembrances of Things Played Presence and Memory in the Pianists Art
216
How Not to Get Gored
230
Foucault and the Imagination of Power
239
The Horizon of R P Blackmur
246
Cairo Recalled Growing Up in the Cultural Crosscurrents of 1940s Egypt
268
Through Gringo Eyes With Conrad in Latin America
276
Identity Authority and Freedom The Potentate and the Traveler
386
The AngloArab Encounter
405
Nationalism Human Rights and Interpretation
411
Traveling Theory Reconsidered
436
History Literature and Geography
453
Contra Mundum
474
Bachs Genius Schumanns Eccentricity Chopins Ruthlessness Rosens Gift
484
Fantasys Role in the Making of Nations
493
On Defiance and Taking Positions
500
From Silence to Sound and Back Again Music Literature and History
507
On Lost Causes
527
Between Worlds
554
The Clash of Definitions
569
Notes
593
Credits
605
Index
609
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About the author (2000)

Born in Jerusalem and educated at Victoria College in Cairo and at Princeton and Harvard universities, Edward Said has taught at Columbia University since 1963 and has been a visiting professor at Harvard and Johns Hopkins University. He has had an unusual dual career as a professor of comparative literature, a recognized expert on the novelist and short story writer Joseph Conrad, (see Vol. 1) and as one of the most significant contemporary writers on the Middle East, especially the Palestinian question and the plight of Palestinians living in the occupied territories. Although he is not a trained historian, his Orientalism (1978) is one of the most stimulating critical evaluations of traditional Western writing on Middle Eastern history, societies, and literature. In the controversial Covering Islam (1981), he examined how the Western media have biased Western perspectives on the Middle East. A Palestinian by birth, Said has sought to show how Palestinian history differs from the rest of Arabic history because of the encounter with Jewish settlers and to present to Western readers a more broadly representative Palestinian position than they usually obtain from Western sources. Said is presently Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia, editor of Arab Studies Quarterly, and chair of the board of trustees of the Institute of Arab Studies. He is a member of the Palestinian National Council as well as the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.