The Cambridge Introduction to Edward Said (Cambridge Introductions to Literature) by Conor McCarthy (EPUB)

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One of the most famous literary critics of the twentieth century, Edward Said’s work has been hugely influential far beyond academia. As a prominent advocate for the Palestinian cause and a noted music critic, Said redefined the role of the public intellectual. In his books, as scholarly as they are readable, he challenged conventional critical demarcations between disciplines. His major opus, Orientalism, is a key text in postcolonial studies that continues to influence as well as challenge scholars in the field. Conor McCarthy introduces the reader to Said’s major works and examines how his work and life were intertwined. He explains recurring themes in Said’s writings on literature and empire, on intellectuals and literary theory, on music and on the Israel/Palestine conflict. This concise, informative and clearly written introduction for students beginning to study Said is ideally set up to explain the complexities of his work to new audiences.

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⭐The footnotes are not formatted in the kindle version of this book. Do not buy this book if you are interested in reading the footnotes.

⭐Edward Said had a strange multiple life as an intellectual. On the one hand, there was the brilliant, maverick literary academic. Then there was the critic of colonialism, who played the major role in codifying Orientalism as the ways in which the colonising countries behaved towards and wrote about the colonised, and did so much to strip the thick veneer of delusion, sentimentality and jingoistic guff from the unpleasant reality of empire, although there has never been any shortage of paid shills willing to slap it all back on again. There was the alert and sensitive music-lover; the all-round cultural critic, writing memorable essays on belly dancing and comic books; the political activist, tireless in his efforts to promote a humane and feasible Palestinian nationhood. And then there was the other Said, the fictional one, the demon king of Palestinian nationalism as incarnated in the form of a Columbia professor, the feared and hated internal enemy, presumably because the real Said was so obviously urbane, cultured and intelligent and yet he – inexplicably! – seemed to align himself with the forces of darkness in the form of Palestinian terrorism.Said himself wisely seldom bothered to defend himself against some of the more loony charges flung at him, knowing that when people are determined to tell outright lies about you to their fans, then nobody will be persuaded if you attempt to set the record straight; and in terms of political intellectuals about whom vast quantities of outright lies have been told by their enemies, Said has few rivals, although Noam Chomsky probably has the edge. Like Chomsky, Said never saw his own mission as an intellectual in especially complex or high-faluting terms. He distrusted intellectuals who sold their services to the authority of the state, which is why he irritated the Palestinian authorities almost as much as he irritated the American right.Conor McCarthy is well-placed to write an introduction to Said’s work. He teaches in the Department of English in NUI Maynooth, and his first book was a collection of bracing and provocative essays on various figures and tendencies in Irish culture of the last thirty to forty years. McCarthy was bracingly unafraid to take on critically acclaimed Irish writers and point out the evasions, contradictions, incoherences and general wishful thinking in their work. This book is somewhat different, being more in praise than in critique, although it’s exactly what it says on the cover: an introduction, not a critical study. McCarthy leads us through the main themes of Said’s work and gives us a very clear sense of how Said grappled with them. I could have used more about Said’s writings on music, even though McCarthy gives a clear and concise account of Said’s encounter with the thinking of Adorno; Adorno is a considerably more controversial figure within academic music studies than either Said or McCarthy appear to note, but then McCarthy is not in the Department of Music (and even if he were, it might be doubted that he’d be writing about Said on Adorno).This book seems to me a model of how to write this kind of thing. It’s informed,and enthusiastic but not apologetic. Sometimes people commissioned to write an ‘introductions to’ end up writing ‘the problem with’; the old Fontana Modern Masters come to mind, the worst offenders being J.G. Merquior’s ‘Foucault’, Donald MacRae’s ‘Weber’ and most notoriously of all, Raymond Williams’ ‘Orwell’. (Orwell was a writer Said had a lot of problems with, and with good reason; but he still deserved better than Williams’ condescension.) McCarthy’s ‘Said’ is not a substitute for reading Said himself; Said was a lucid and elegant stylist whose works do not require detailed commentary to understand . But it’s not intended to be. It dispels myths, points out lines of approach and suggests why anyone interested in thinking seriously about culture and society and the relationship between them needs to come to grips with Said, sooner or later. And that’s exactly the point of a book like this.

⭐Famously, the American magazine Commentary dubbed Edward Said “the professor of terror”. What terrified right-wingers and Zionists about Said was not anything he said or did but the very fact of his existence: a Palestinian humanist intellectual, flourishing in the groves of Western academe, who refused to keep silent about the wrongs done to his people yet advocated peaceful co-existence between Arabs and Jews.Conor McCarthy’s Cambridge Introduction to Edward Said is a short book – a mere 138 pages – yet manages, almost miraculously, to summarize every significant book that the prolific Said wrote, from Beginnings (1975) to Culture and Imperialism (1993). This is preceded by a biographical introduction and a chapter on Influences (phenomenology, philology, Marxism, poststructuralism) and succeeded by one on Reception.Dr McCarthy, an Irish academic, writes without haste or jargon, yet manages to encapsulate an enormous amount of detailed discussion and exposition, together with a nuanced account of the political context – specifically, the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories – within which, but geographically far from which, Said wrote and taught.McCarthy has a genius – the word is no overstatement – for lucid synopsis, and doesn’t shy away from grappling with leftist critiques of Said from the likes of Aijaz Ahmad and James Clifford as well as the more predictable assaults from the right (Bernard Lewis).There are issues that are barely if at all touched on here, such as the paradoxical relationship between Said’s passionate opposition to orientalism (a concept that he influentially redefined) and his equally passionate advocacy of the Western literary canon – the “Great Tradition” – which was in so many ways permeated by that orientalism. There is also room for a more searching analysis of Said’s writings on music and his sometimes perverse self-identification with the German philosopher Adorno.However, these are the merest cavils. McCarthy provides solid grounds for his eloquent conclusion that “Said offers his readers… a brilliant and exemplary instance of the intellectual life well lived, in all its richness, complexity and commitment.”

⭐For my money, this is exactly what a primer should be: thorough, detailed and concise, but also attentive to nuance and the ebb and flow of a major writer’s thinking. A primer, but not just a primer in other words.It’s the opposite of purely functional, as each section teases out a comprehensive view of its subject via a very specific, informed angle of entry, which helps to unify the multiple, sometimes divergent, sometimes overlapping strands of Said’s oeuvre.The result of this approach is that that some central themes, in particular notions of marginality and authority, begin to circulate throughout, informing our interpretation of Said in a thoroughgoing way and allowing what is above all an engaged take on him.Like other reviewers here, I would have liked more on his work on music, as I’m intrigued as to how it related to his other work. And the final section on the critical reception of his work lacks a sense of cut and thrust I think. Real world academic, literary-critical or cultural disputes can often be ribald, cut throat affairs, and often were in Said’s case, but McCarthy, while forensic, offers a fairly dry account of them. This section is a missed opportunity to engage uncertain, possibly intimidated freshmen, by showing the ‘worldliness’ of Said’s oeuvre.That said, they’d be doing themselves a disservice if they don’t use this text as an elegant entry point to a complex body of work.

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