Includes bibliographical references and index.

Labyrinth of incarnations: the esays of Maurice Merleau-Ponty -- Sense and sensibility: on R.P. Blackmur, Georges Poulet, and E.D. Hirsch -- Amateur of the insoluble: on E.M. Cioran -- A standing civil war: on T.E. Lawrence -- Arabic prose and prose fiction after 1948 -- Between chance and determinism: Lukács's Aesthetik -- Conrad and Nietzsche -- Vico on the discipline of bodies and texts -- Tourism among the dogs: on George Orwell -- Bitter dispatches from the Third World -- Grey Eminence: on Walter Lippmann -- Among the believers: on V.S. Naipaul -- Opponents, audiences, constituencies, and community -- Bursts of meaning: on John Berger and Jean Mohr -- Egyptian rites -- The future of criticism -- Reflections on exile -- Michel Foucault, 1927-1984 -- Orientalism reconsidered -- Remembrances of things played: presence and memory in the pianist's art: on Glenn Gould -- How not to get gored: on Ernest Hemingway -- Foucault and the imagination of power -- The horizon of R.P. Blackmur -- Cairo recalled: growing up in the cultural crosscurrents of 1940s Egypt -- Through gringo eyes: with Conrad in Latin America -- The quest for Gillo Pontecorvo -- Representing the colonized: anthropology's interlocutors -- After Mahfouz -- Jungle calling: on Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan -- Cairo and Alexandria -- Homage to a belly-dancer: on Tahia Carioca -- Introduction to Moby-Dick -- The politics of knowledge -- Identity, authority, and freedom: the potentate and the traveler -- The Anglo-Arab encounter: on Ahdaf Soueif -- Nationalism, human rights, and interpretation -- Traveling theory reconsidered -- History, literature, and geography -- Contra mundum: on Eric Hobsbawm -- Bach's genius, Schumann's eccentricity, Chopin's ruthlessness, Rosen's gift -- Fantasy's role in the making of nations: on Jacqueline Rose -- On defiance and taking positions -- From silence to sound and back again: music, literature, and history -- On lost causes -- Between worlds -- The clash of definitions: on Samuel Huntington.

This Long-Awaited Collection of literary and cultural essays by Edward W. Said, 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. 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 Lippmann, Samuel Huntington, Antonio Gramsci, and Raymond Williams. Said makes a strong and eloquent attack on what he calls "aestheticized powerlessness," a habitual stance of many in the academy. Most of the key debates in the humanities over the last thirty years are taken up in this book, and a number of them are given definitive treatment here.