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. |
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 |
609 | |