Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Convergences (Cambridge, Mass.).)

Rating:
Summary: The best book I have ever read
Review: I don't understand the rather vicious comments below. I think that when Said claims that he's an exile, he doesn't simply means it in the political sense but a state of mind or a state of being. It means to be skeptical, cultured, and intellectually rigorous. I think some of the essays shows what it means to be a humanist in the best sense of the word. I too see myself as an exile despite a totally different set of experiences and circumstances. With this book, Said offers us a complex personality as well as an thoughtful and sensitive way of looking at the world and living in it. It might just be a manifesto of sorts for exiles just like myself.

Rating:
Summary: JARGON FREE HUMANISM
Review: I don't understand the rather vicious comments below. I think that when Said claims that he's an exile, he doesn't simply means it in the political sense but a state of mind or a state of being. It means to be skeptical, cultured, and intellectually rigorous. I think some of the essays shows what it means to be a humanist in the best sense of the word. I too see myself as an exile despite a totally different set of experiences and circumstances. With this book, Said offers us a complex personality as well as an thoughtful and sensitive way of looking at the world and living in it. It might just be a manifesto of sorts for exiles just like myself.

Rating:
Summary: If you like Said, you'll love it, if not what do you expect?
Review: I find that I disagree with Said just slightly more than I agree with him. The book, a collection of Essays/magazine articles has some valuable insights, but as anyone who has read Said knows, he takes more than a few pages to say what could be condensed to a paragraph or two sentences.

Of course, my other criticism is that so much of his work is laden with his personal baggage, this being no exception. However, this is not an attack on Mr. Said. As I said, there are some gems in this book so, if you have the time, and you are not easily offended by one who is so often critical of the West, this book may be perfect for you.

Rating:
Summary: Reflections on Exile and Other Essays
Review: The essay is a text that is closer to what we mortals can write than the book is close. And yet, it is all the more amazing to witness Said's attempts at a form I'm known to attempt. Because he can simply say things I cannot say. His writing is pyrotechnical. As Zappa would say, it's "stunt writing". It's not only worth reading, it's worth memorizing. As Said says, "Extraordinary varieties of diversity are open to text." Some people can take these simple words we all know and link them in magical series. They have figured out how to do this. They've been told secrets few have been told.

"History is a battle of interpretations." Text never floats. It is always sourced in other texts. If you read Said, you begin to feel closer and closer to his intelligence, until it's almost like he's here with you, conversing. That's good, because most of us won't have the gift of direct access to him. But this also happens with the world. Each of us is imprisoned in a small arena of consciousness. Other people can join us in it, but we can never leave. We can never get outside our lives. Unless text. With it, we can see. We can bring vast horizons of experience into our arenas. And it's not just like having a writer with us. Because text is not just what writers think. It's more than that. We can write things we'd never be able to say. We can write things we wouldn't even have been able to think before we wrote them. Like DeLillo, we don't know what we know, until we write.

Rating:
Summary: A wildly diverse collection, but still brilliant
Review: The lies about Edward Said are more frequently encountered than his actual words, at least as far as most of the media are concerned, which is another reason to actually read his books, as opposed to reading people's opinions about them. He is supposed to be a Marxist (because he occasionally writes about Marx as somebody whose thinking has had a concrete effect upon the world, which, let's face it, it has had); he is supposed to be an apologist for terrorism (never mind that, as Forrest Gump would say, terrorism is as terrorism does - that, for example, the Contras were, from the Sandinistan point of view, terrorists, but because they were trained and funded by the CIA they are instead "freedom fighters"). He is supposed, by some reviewers, to believe that "all texts are meaningless" and that what writers intend has nothing to do with anything. A quick glance at his actual works will dispel all these illusions, unless you are so emotionally committed to a certain point of view that your rational brain is on permanent holiday in the Adirondacks, or wherever.

On top of all this, the fact that he's a tenured professor in Columbia is supposed to mitigate against his qualifications for explaining and interpreting the complexities of Arabic culture to the rest of us. Oh, he's a martini-sipping Bach-lover, what does he know about oppression. Nobody supposes that the fact that, say, Harold Bloom, is also a tenured professor, should detract from Bloom's qualities as an expert on European and American culture.

His most famous work has probably been his meticulous unpicking of the attitudes of European and American colonists towards "the Orient" - a phrase that can only appear within inverted commas after reading his brilliant "Orientalism". But this collection, representing 30 years of reviews and speeches, reveals the (to me) startling range of Said's interests. There are meticulous and beautifully forensic essays on TE Lawrence and Samuel Huntington (the latter particularly timely, as Huntington has been widely cited in the aftermath of September 11th, and Said shows us just how partisan and polemical Huntington's supposedly objective analysis is.) There's also a tender tribute to Johnny Weissmuller's portrayal of "Tarzan", and a spirited eulogy to a celebrated belly-dancer, as well as a wonderful introduction to "Moby-Dick" that, to me, represents the best Melville criticism I've ever seen.

Said is one of the few intellectuals in America who has never ceased to be aware of the potentially disastrous separation of culture from politics. His career has been both a crusade against misinformation and lies, and a noble tribute to the power of culture to help us think again about reality. This book is an excellent introduction to his work.

Rating:
Summary: A satisfying intellectual journey
Review: This book takes you onto a spectacular and highly satisfying intellectual journey. Many essayists set up their tent with the first couple of paragraphs and then spend the rest of the time just rearranging the furniture inside. With Said, one never knows what point he might make next, what brilliant new connection will be created before our eyes. You can tell by reading this collection how Said won his reputation as a fantastic lecturer and educator. I guess this is why Columbia University stuck by him when he was being vilified by his enemies for championing the Palestinian cause and demanding the end of Israeli occupation. Buy it, read it, enjoy!

Rating:
Summary: Criticism at its Best
Review: This collection of essays is a new triumph for Said whose exceptional energy and courage should be an example for all of us. Ever since he was diagnosed with cancer, he has been engaged in a Proustian race against time producing such compelling works as "Culture and Imperialism", "Out of Place", and "The End of the Peace Process".
"Reflections on Exile" includes some of the finest essays written in the second half of the twentieth century. No critic could afford to ignore such important pieces as "Opponents, audiences, constituencies, and community" and "Traveling theory reconsidered". Not for Said is jargon or ill considered perspective; his thought is always sober and penetrating.
His greaest contribution was that he forced the academy to consider the narrative of the marginalised, the "voiceless", paving the way for an understanding of the world as inhabited by equal humans-- not superior "westerners" and inferior "easterners". But his contribution is not limited to deconstructing the Manicheanism of the post-colonial world; Said is the most insightful critic of his generation. He has an unmatched ability to capture the most delicate nuances in both the aesthetic and political realms. Whether he is comparing Nietzsche and Conrad or reflecting upon the Question of Palestine, Said proves his indispensibility by avoiding the pits of hazy thought that others regularly fall into.
Professor Said is simply the finest essayist alive; even on a purely literary basis, the merit of his writting is undeniable. He is passionate, coherent, and eloquent.
This collection of essays should be of interest to anybody concerned with literary theory, music, cultural criticism, politics and theory of nationalism. It provides a good overview of Said's breathtaking range of thought, and also includes first rate criticism on many thinkers,novelists, and musicians including: Conrad, Vico, Adorno, Lukacs, Orwell, Naipaul, Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche, Gould, Hemingway, Mahfouz, Hobsbawm, Blackmur, Gramsci and Foucault.
Said is an engaged intellectual hero. Like Sartre, Russell, and Chomsky, his presence has been essential as a thinker who chooses to be in exile, who avoids the centres of dominance and keeps a distance (but is never detached) from society in order to be able to speak truth to power. His work provides a base for us to work on building human narratives free of hegemony. After Said, we cannot afford but to have a "contrapuntal" reading of the world, celebrating the values of enlightenment, hybridity, and freedom.

Rating:
Summary: Reflections on Exile and Other Essays
Review: This long-awaited collection of literary & cultural essays, with the political undercurrent not uncommon in Said's work, affords rare insight into the formation of a keen critic & the development of an intellectual vocation.

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Summary: a static theorist
Review: Well as Said books go this one is the most palatable as his long held interests are divided up into individual essays and not all garbled together as his book length studies are. Said is a theorist if you don't already know that. He has theories about history, about knowledge, about how culture is created and transmitted, about individual thinkers, about books, about everything. In this book you get both his favorite thinkers, many of them theorists themselves, and his theories about their theories. I think theories are fine so long as they are not over used or relied on too much. I personally think Said is far too reliant on his collection of theories. So much so that he can't think outside of them. Some thinkers are stuck in an old way of thinking, Said is stuck in his new way of thinking which if you have followed his career doesn't feel that new anymore. The same theories are marched out over and over again. I don't find him a particularly insightful literary thinker nor do I find in him an intellectual who broadens out from book to book and expands his ideas, evolves them. I find his work mired in the same old theories he began with thirty years ago. This book will not change your opinion about Said if you already have one. It will clarify some of the confusion if you are looking to understand him better as all of his sources are identified and discussed here. The familiar 17th Italian Vico, the marxist Antonio Gramsici,and Foucault are all given further treatment and several literary essays are also included on Conrad, T.E Lawrence, the critic R.P. Blackmur,& V.S. Naipaul.