Chapter 3 - Works

Summary

Edward Said's working career was characterised by a number of features: (1) the variety of his interests; (2) the unorthodox academic or disciplinary pattern; (3) the willingness to step outside of his declared area of specialisation; (4) the interest in the politics of the Middle East. In literary-critical terms, he wrote across the entire span of Western literature, from Euripides to George Orwell. He only wrote one conventional monograph (usually defined as a single-author study), his book on Conrad. The Polish writer would recur in Said's writing, in numerous later books, but Said would never again devote an entire study to just one writer. Thereafter, we get a complex and rich meditation on intellectual history, as dramatised in a wide variety of European nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction and criticism (Beginnings); an extraordinary critique of Western images and knowledge-production of the Arab Orient, in literature, history, travel-writing and policy-formulation (Orientalism); a major intervention into Western ideas about the Palestine question (The Question of Palestine); essays largely concerned with the conditions and possibilities for literary criticism (The World, the Text, and the Critic); polemical essays on Palestine (Blaming the Victims); a meditative book on Palestinian life, especially exile (After the Last Sky); a massive study of empire and culture, significantly moving on from Orientalism (Culture and Imperialism); essays on music and opera (Musical Elaborations); an unfolding concern with ‘late style’ (On Late Style, Freud and the Non-European); and four volumes of political essays (The Politics of Dispossession; Peace and Its Discontents; The End of the Peace Process; From Oslo to Iraq and the Roadmap).