Edward Said's Rhetoric of the Secular [Paperback]

Edward Said's Rhetoric of the Secular provides an important new reading of Edward W. Said's work, emphasizing not only the distinction but also the fuzzy borders between representations of 'the religious' and 'the secular' found within and throughout his oeuvre and at the core of some of his most customary rhetorical strategies.???

Mathieu Courville begins by examining Said's own reflections on his life, before moving on to key debates about Said's work within Religious Studies and Middle Eastern Studies,?and his relationship to French critical theorists.??

Through close attention to Said's use of the literal and the figurative when dealing with religious, national and cultural matters, Courville discerns a pattern that illuminates what Said means by secular. Said's work?shows that?the secular is not the utter opposite of religion in the modern globalized world, but?may exist in a productive tension with it.

Introduction
1. Being and not being like a book: History, memory, and self-understanding

2. The Empire writes back: From Bernard Lewis to Martin Kramer

3. Scholars of religion and the return of the repressed: William D. Hart and Carl Olson

4. An emergent conversation: Work on Said's religious' question

5. Theoretical travelogues: A slight return from Foucault back to Fanon and Sartre

6. Convergences': The other Arab Muslims' and the other America'

7. The essay as form' of resistance: On the essayistic spirit in Adorno and Said

Conclusion

Bibliography

Appendices

Mathieu E. Courville was awarded a Canada Graduate Doctoral Award as well as a Canada Post-Doctoral Award from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). He has served as Canadian Graduate Student Representative of the Canadian Corporationl“#