Author: Edward W Said
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2001
Language: English
Pages: 617
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0143027913
Description
This book is a monument to the life of the intellect in the modern world. Most of the key debates in the humanities over the last thirty years are taken up in this book, and given definitive treatment, and confirm its author as one of the most important and elegant critics of our time.
This long awaited collection brings together Edward Said's essays on literary and cultural topics from over three decades. As the title piece, Reflection on Exile, makes clear, the fact of Said own exile and the fate of the Palestinians have given both form and intimacy to the questions he has pursued. Taken together, these essays give a rare insight into the formation of a critic and the development of an intellectual vocation. They cover a wide and sometimes surprising range of topics - from the heroics of Tarzan and the machismo of Ernest Hemingway to the shades of difference that divide Alexandria and Cairo. Said also offers major reconsiderations of writers and artists such as George Orwell, Giambattista Vico, Georg Lukacs, E M Cioran, Naguib Mahfouz, Herman Melville, Joseph Conard, Antonio Gramsci and Raymond Williams.
Most of the key debates in the humanities over the last thirty years are taken up in this book, and given definitive treatment. This book confirms Said as one of the most important and elegant critics of our time.
Contents
Introduction
1. Labyrinth of Incarnations : The Essays of Maurice Merleau-Ponty
2. Sense and Sensibility
3. Amateur of the Insolube
4. A Standing Civil War
5. Arabic Prose and Prose Fiction After 1948
6. Between Chance and Determinism : Lukacs's Aesthetik
7. Conrad and Nietzsche
8. Vico on the Discipline of Bodies and texts
9. Tourism among the Dogs
10. Bitter Dispatches from the Third World
11. Grey Eminence
12. Among the Believers
13. Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community
14. Bursts of Meaning
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
21. How not to Get Gored
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 Pontecorvo
27. Representing the Colonized : Anthropology's Interlocutors
28. After Mahfouz
29. Jungle Calling
30. Cairo and Alexandria
31. Homage to a Belly-Dancer
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
36. Nationalism, Human Rights, and Interpretation
37. Traveling Theory Reconsidered
38. History, Literature, and Geography
39. Contra Mundum
40. Bach's Genius, Schumann's Eccentricity, Chopin's Ruthlessness,
Rosen's Gift
41. Fantasy's Role in the Making of Nations
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
Notes
Credits
Index