Books by Edward W. Said
From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map: Essays
Nadine Gordimer once wrote, referring to Edward Said’s memoir Out of Place, “Said is in place among the truly important intellects in our century.” These forty-six eloquent and impassioned essays written by Said between December 2000 and July 2003 for the London-based Al-Hayat, Cairo’s Al-Ahram Weekly, and the London Review of Books underscore his tireless efforts for the Palestinian cause. They take us from the collapse of the Oslo Accords to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, focusing on three main themes, as Tony Judt points out in his introduction: the urgent need to reveal the truth about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, the equally urgent need to get Palestinians and other Arabs to engage with the progressive elements in Israel, and the need to speak out about the failure of Arab leadership.
In From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map, Said writes about the second intifada and about the so-called peace process, which he terms a kind of “fast-food peace” underscored by “malevolent sloppiness.” He discusses the breach of democracy in the last American presidential election and describes the Bush administration as hopeless in its allegiance to the Christian right and to the big oil companies. He writes passionately against the war in Iraq and condemns the “road map” as a plan not for peace but for pacification of the Palestinians. He makes clear the ways in which the U.S. response to 9/11 has further destabilized the Middle East, but finds as well reasons for hope: the Palestinian National Initiative, an organization of grassroots activists who share a burgeoning idea of democracy “undreamed of by the [Palestinian] Authority.” What has always set Said apart is his ability to state the uncensored truth about the realities of the Palestinian experience, from land expropriation, and dispossession, to assassinations, roadblocks, and house demolitions.
In this book, Said reveals information that never finds its way into the American media, thus providing a real context for our understanding of the Middle East. Fiercely uncompromising, written with clarity and elegance, From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map gives us an essential and unique voice that is more important now than ever before.
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From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map: Essays
In his final book, completed just before his death, Edward W. Said offers impassioned pleas for the beleaguered Palestinian cause.
“These searing essays refract the reality of terrible years through a mind with extraordinary understanding, compassion, insight, and deep knowledge.” —Noam Chomsky
These essays, which originally appeared in Cairo’s Al-Ahram Weekly, London’s Al-Hayat, and the London Review of Books, take us from the Oslo Accords through the U.S. led invasion of Iraq, and present information and perspectives too rarely visible in America.
Said is unyielding in his call for truth and justice. He insists on truth about Israel's role as occupier and its treatment of the Palestinians. He pleads for new avenues of communication between progressive elements in Israel and Palestine. And he is equally forceful in his condemnation of Arab failures and the need for real leadership in the Arab world.
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On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain
In his fascinating last book, Edward Said looks at a selection of essays, poems, novels, films, and operas to determine what late style may explain about the evolution of the creative life. He discusses how the approaching death of an artist can make its way “with anachronism and anomaly” into his work, as was the case in the late work of Thomas Mann, Richard Strauss, Jean Genet, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, and C. P. Cavafy. Said examines Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, Genet’s Le captif amoureux and Les paravents, Mozart’s Così fan tutte, Visconti’s film of Lampedusa’s The Leopard, Euripides’ The Bacchae and Iphigenia at Aulis, and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, among other works.
He points out that one can also find an “unearthly serenity,” in last works, for example, in Sophocles, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Matisse, Bach, and Wagner, which, as Said puts it, “crown a lifetime of aesthetic endeavor.” But in On Late Style he concentrates on artistic lateness as “intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction.” He also writes about Theodor Adorno and about Glenn Gould, who chose to stop performing, thereby creating his own form of lateness. Said makes clear that most of the works discussed are rife with deep conflict and an almost impenetrable complexity. In fact, he feels that lateness is often “a form of exile.” These works frequently stood in direct contrast to what was popular at the time, but they were forerunners of what was to come in each artist’s particular discipline—works of true genius.
Eloquent and impassioned, brilliantly reasoned and revelatory, On Late Style is Edward Said’s own great last work.
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On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain
In this fascinating book, Edward Said looks at the creative contradictions that often mark the late works of literary and musical artists.
"These studies . . . buzz with excitement and intelligence and demonstrate...the extraordinary range of Said’s intellectual interests.” —Frank Kermode, London Review of Books
Said shows how the approaching death of an artist can make its way into his work, examining essays, poems, novels, films, and operas by such artists as Beethoven, Genet, Mozart, Lampedusa, Euripides, Cavafy, and Mann, among others. He uncovers the conflicts and complexity that often distinguish artistic lateness, resulting in works that stood in direct contrast to what was popular at the time and were forerunners of what was to come in each artist's discipline–works of true genius.
Eloquent and impassioned, brilliantly reasoned and revelatory, On Late Style is Edward Said's own great last work.
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Orientalism
A groundbreaking critique of the West's historical, cultural, and political perceptions of the East that is—three decades after its first publication—one of the most important books written about our divided world.
"Intellectual history on a high order ... and very exciting." —The New York Times
In this wide-ranging, intellectually vigorous study, Said traces the origins of "orientalism" to the centuries-long period during which Europe dominated the Middle and Near East and, from its position of power, defined "the orient" simply as "other than" the occident. This entrenched view continues to dominate western ideas and, because it does not allow the East to represent itself, prevents true understanding.
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Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Convergences: Inventories of the Present)
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.
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Out of Place: A Memoir
WINNER OF THE NEW YORKER BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION • From one of the most important intellectuals of our time comes an extraordinary story of exile and a celebration of an irrecoverable past. A fatal medical diagnosis in 1991 convinced Edward Said that he should leave a record of where he was born and spent his childhood, and so with this memoir he rediscovers the lost Arab world of his early years in Palestine, Lebanon, and Egypt.
"Engrossing. . . . [Said has] an almost Proustian feel for smells, sounds, sights, and telling anecdotes." --The New York Review of Books
Said writes with great passion and wit about his family and his friends from his birthplace in Jerusalem, schools in Cairo, and summers in the mountains above Beirut, to boarding school and college in the United States, revealing an unimaginable world of rich, colorful characters and exotic eastern landscapes. Underscoring all is the confusion of identity the young Said experienced as he came to terms with the dissonance of being an American citizen, a Christian and a Palestinian, and, ultimately, an outsider. Richly detailed, moving, often profound, Out of Place depicts a young man's coming of age and the genesis of a great modern thinker.
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Culture and Imperialism
A landmark work from the author of Orientalism that explores the long-overlooked connections between the Western imperial endeavor and the culture that both reflected and reinforced it.
"Grandly conceived . . . urgently written and urgently needed. . . . No one studying the relations between the metropolitan West and the decolonizing world can ignore Mr. Said's work.' --The New York Times Book Review
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the Western powers built empires that stretched from Australia to the West Indies, Western artists created masterpieces ranging from Mansfield Park to Heart of Darkness and Aida. Yet most cultural critics continue to see these phenomena as separate. Edward Said looks at these works alongside those of such writers as W. B. Yeats, Chinua Achebe, and Salman Rushdie to show how subject peoples produced their own vigorous cultures of opposition and resistance. Vast in scope and stunning in its erudition, Culture and Imperialism reopens the dialogue between literature and the life of its time.
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I Saw Ramallah
by Edward W. Said, Ahdaf Soueif, Mourid Barghouti
WINNER OF THE NAGUIB MAHFOUZ MEDAL FOR LITERATURE
A fierce and moving work and an unparalleled rendering of the human aspects of the Palestinian predicament.
Barred from his homeland after 1967’s Six-Day War, the poet Mourid Barghouti spent thirty years in exile—shuttling among the world’s cities, yet secure in none of them; separated from his family for years at a time; never certain whether he was a visitor, a refugee, a citizen, or a guest. As he returns home for the first time since the Israeli occupation, Barghouti crosses a wooden bridge over the Jordan River into Ramallah and is unable to recognize the city of his youth. Sifting through memories of the old Palestine as they come up against what he now encounters in this mere “idea of Palestine,” he discovers what it means to be deprived not only of a homeland but of “the habitual place and status of a person.” A tour de force of memory and reflection, lamentation and resilience, I Saw Ramallah is a deeply humane book, essential to any balanced understanding of today’s Middle East.
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Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society
by Edward W. Said, Daniel Barenboim
These free-wheeling, often exhilarating dialogues are an exchange between two prominent figures in contemporary culture: Daniel Barenboim, internationally renowned conductor and pianist, and Edward W. Said, eminent literary critic and impassioned commentator on the Middle East. Barenboim is an Argentinian-Israeli and Said a Palestinian-American; they are also close friends.
“[A] genuine give-and-take between keen minds and open hearts. . . . The fluidity of their relationship, like musicians in an orchestra, is a compelling model for a world often splintered by dogma, ideology and hermetically sealed minds.” –Los Angeles Times
As they range across music, literature, and society, they open up many fields of inquiry: the importance of a sense of place; music as a defiance of silence; the legacies of artists from Mozart and Beethoven to Dickens and Adorno; Wagner’s anti-Semitism; and the need for “artistic solutions” to the predicament of the Middle East—something they both witnessed when they brought young Arab and Israeli musicians together. Erudite, intimate, thoughtful and spontaneous, Parallels and Paradoxes is a virtuosic collaboration.
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Culture and Resistance
by Edward W. Said, David Barsamian
Edward W. Saiddiscusses the centrality of popular resistance to his understanding of culture, history, and social change. He reveals his thoughts on the war on terrorism, the war in Afghanistan, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and lays out a compelling vision for a secular, democratic future in the Middle East—and globally.
Edward W. Said’s books include Orientalism, The Question of Palestine, Covering Islam, Culture and Imperialism, and The Politics of Dispossession. He has also published a memoir, Out of Place.
David Barsamianis the producer of the critically acclaimed program Alternative Radio.
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The Selected Works of Edward Said, 1966 - 2006
The renowned literary and cultural critic Edward Said was one of our era’s most provocative and important thinkers. This comprehensive collection of his work draws from across his entire four-decade career, including his posthumously published books, making it a definitive one-volume source.
"Said is a brilliant and unique amalgam of scholar, aesthete, and political activist...[He] challenges and stimulates our thinking in every area." --Washington Post Book World
The Selected Works includes key sections from all of Said’s books, including his groundbreaking Orientalism; his memoir, Out of Place; and his last book, On Late Style. Whether writing of Zionism or Palestinian self-determination, Jane Austen or Yeats, or of music or the media, Said’s uncompromising intelligence casts urgent light on every subject he undertakes. The Selected Works is a joy for the general reader and an indispensable resource for scholars in the many fields that his work has influenced and transformed.
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The Edward Said Reader
by Edward W. Said, Moustafa Bayoumi, Andrew Rubin
Edward Said, the renowned literary and cultural critic and passionately engaged intellectual, is one of our era's most formidable, provocative, and important thinkers. For more than three decades his books, which include Culture and Imperialism, Peace and Its Discontents, and the seminal study Orientalism, have influenced not only our worldview but the very terms of public discourse.
The Edward Said Reader includes key sections from all of Said's books, from the groundbreaking 1966 study of Joseph Conrad to his new memoir, Out of Place. Whether he is writing of Zionism or Palestinian self-determination, Jane Austen or Yeats, music or the media, Said's uncompromising intelligence casts urgent light on every subject he undertakes. The Edward Said Reader will prove a joy to the general reader and an indispensable resource for scholars of politics, history, literature, and cultural studies: in short, of all those fields that his work has influenced and, in some cases, transformed.
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After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives
A searing portrait of Palestinian life and identity that is at once an exploration of Edward Said's unclaimable past and a testimony to the lives of those living in exile.
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Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature - New and Expanded Edition (Princeton Classics, 1)
by Edward W. Said, Erich Auerbach
The classic book that has taught generations how to read Western literature
More than half a century after its translation into English, Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis remains a masterpiece of literary criticism. A brilliant display of erudition, wit, and wisdom, his exploration of how great European writers from Homer to Virginia Woolf depict reality has taught generations how to read Western literature.
A German Jew who was forced out of his professorship at the University of Marburg in 1935, Auerbach left for Turkey, where he taught in Istanbul. There he wrote Mimesis, publishing it in German after the war. Displaced as he was, Auerbach produced a work of great erudition that contains no footnotes, basing his arguments instead on searching, illuminating readings of key passages from his primary texts. His aim was to show how, from antiquity to modernity, literature progresses toward ever more naturalistic and democratic forms of representation. Ranging over works in Greek, Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and English, Auerbach uses his remarkable skills in philology and comparative literature to present an optimistic view of Western history and culture and to refute any narrow form of nationalism or chauvinism.
This expanded Princeton Classics edition of Mimesis includes a substantial introduction by Edward Said as well as an essay in which Auerbach responds to his critics.
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Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures
In these impassioned and inspiring essays, based on his 1993 Reith Lectures, Edward Said explores what it means to be an intellectual.
"Said is a brilliant and unique amalgam of scholar, aesthete and political activist. . . . He challenges and stimulates our thinking in every area." --Washington Post Book World
Are intellectuals merely the servants of special interests or do they have a larger responsibility? In these wide-ranging essays, one of our most brilliant and fiercely independent public thinkers addresses this question with extraordinary eloquence. Said sees the the intellectual as an exile and amateur whose role it is "to speak the truth to power" even at the risk of ostracism or imprisonment. Drawing on the examples of Jonathan Swift and Theodor Adorno, Robert Oppenheimer and Henry Kissinger, Vietnam and the Gulf War, Said explores the implications of this idea and shows what happens when intellectuals succumb to the lures of money, power, or specialization.
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Peace And Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process
In works such as Culture and Imperialism, Said compelled us to question our culture's most privileged myths. With this impassioned and incisive book, the foremost Palestinian-American intellectual challenges the official version of the Middle East "peace process."
"He challenges and stimulates our thinking in every area."—Washington Post Book World.
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The Question of Palestine
This original and deeply provocative book was the first to make Palestine the subject of a serious debate--one that remains as critical as ever.
"A compelling call for identity and justice." —Anthony Lewis
"Books such as Mr. Said's need to be written and read in the hope that understanding will provide a better chance of survival." —The New York Times Book Review
With the rigorous scholarship he brought to his influential Orientalism and an exile's passion (he is Palestinian by birth), Edward W. Said traces the fatal collision between two peoples in the Middle East and its repercussions in the lives of both the occupier and the occupied--as well as in the conscience of the West. He has updated this landmark work to portray the changed status of Palestine and its people in light of such developments as the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the intifada, the Gulf War, and the ongoing MIddle East peace initiative. For anyone interested in this region and its future, The Question of Palestine remains the most useful and authoritative account available.
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The World, the Text, and the Critic
This extraordinarily wide-ranging work represents a new departure for contemporary literary theory. Author of Beginnings and the controversial Orientalism, Edward Said demonstrates that modern critical discourse has been impressively strengthened by the writings of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, for example, and by such influences as Marxism, structuralism, linguistics, and psychoanalysis. He argues, however, that the various methods and schools have had a crippling effect through their tendency to force works of literature to meet the requirements of a theory or system, ignoring the complex affiliations binding the texts to the world.
The critic must maintain a distance both from critical systems and from the dogmas and orthodoxies of the dominant culture, Said contends. He advocates freedom of consciousness and responsiveness to history, to the exigencies of the text, to political, social, and human values, to the heterogeneity of human experience. These characteristics are brilliantly exemplified in his own analyses of individual authors and works.
Combining the principles and practice of criticism, the book offers illuminating investigations of a number of writers―Swift, Conrad, Lukács, Renan, and many others―and of concepts such as repetition, originality, worldliness, and the roles of audiences, authors, and speakers. It asks daring questions, investigates problems of urgent significance, and gives a subtle yet powerful new meaning to the enterprise of criticism in modern society.
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Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said
Edward Said has long been considered one of the world’s most compelling public intellectuals, taking on a remarkable array of topics with his many publications. But no single book has encompassed the vast scope of his stimulating erudition quite like Power, Politics, and Culture.
“A fascinating, oblique entry into the mind of one whose own writings . . . are a brilliant questioning chronicle of contemporary culture and values.” --Nadine Gordimer
In these twenty-eight interviews, Said addresses everything from Palestine to Pavarotti, from his nomadic upbringing under colonial rule to his politically active and often controversial adulthood, and reflects on Austen, Beckett, Conrad, Naipaul, Mahfouz, and Rushdie, as well as on fellow critics Bloom, Derrida, and Foucault. The passion Said feels for literature, music, history, and politics is powerfully conveyed in this indispensable complement to his prolific life's work.
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Covering Islam How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World
In this classic work, the author of Culture and Imperialism reveals the hidden agendas and distortions of fact that underlie even the most "objective" coverage of the Islamic world. • With a new foreword by Laleh Khalili
"No one stuyding the relations between the West and the decolonizing world can ignore Mr. Said's work." --The New York Times Book Review
From the Iranian hostage crisis through the Gulf War and the bombing of the World Trade Center, the American news media have portrayed "Islam" as a monolithic entity, synonymous with terrorism and religious hysteria. At the same time, Islamic countries use "Islam" to justify unrepresentative and often repressive regimes. Combining political commentary with literary criticism, Covering Islam continues Edward Said's lifelong investigation of the ways in which language not only describes but also defines political reality.
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Said on Opera
"In May of 1997 Edward W. Said delivered the Empson Lectures at Cambridge University under the title 'Authority and Transgression in Opera.' He planned to publish the lectures with Cambridge but never finished the manuscript. Some portions of the lectures were published in journals, about 20 years ago.The lecture typescripts are preserved in the Edward W. Said Papers at Columbia. The Edward W. Said Estate and Wouter Capitain have collaborated on the proposal for this book. The typescripts require minor editing, and an introduction, which Capitain plans to write. The introduction will explain the background of the lectures and position the book within Said's work on music and postcolonial theory. In four case studies on Cosi fan tutte, Fidelio, Les Troyens, and Die Meistersinger, Said deftly renders these operas more problematic and interesting than they have come to seem, thanks to his attention to both the works' historical context and the political possibilities open to contemporary interpreters. He questions the extent to which these operas are predetermined by the 'authority' of their historical context, or whether they instead 'transgress' their initial context and maintain their agency within contemporary society. These questions are central to Said's work at large, including in The World, The Text, and the Critic (1983), Culture and Imperialism (1993), and Humanism and Democratic Criticism (CUP 2004), which analyzes the political context of the arts while also arguing that artworks can occupy a relatively autonomous and potentially subversive position within society. 'Authority and Transgression in Opera' foregrounds these questions about art and society, perhaps more than any of his other books. Said analyzes how these operas negotiate the power structures in which they operate by mirroring their historical social position to the portrayal of authority and transgression in the works themselves. He argues that the historical themes in these operas remain relevant today, and he appreciates stagings that highlight the contemporary resonances in these works"--
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