Reflections on Exile and Other Essays

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...

(展开全部)

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.

Introduction
1. Labyrinth of Incarnations: The Essays of Maurice Merleau-Ponty
2. Sense and Sensibility: On R. P. Blackmur, Georges Poulet, and E. D. Hirsch
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
· · · · · · (更多)

Introduction
1. Labyrinth of Incarnations: The Essays of Maurice Merleau-Ponty
2. Sense and Sensibility: On R. P. Blackmur, Georges Poulet, and E. D. Hirsch
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 Pontecorvo
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
· · · · · · (收起)