Representations of the Intellectual [Paperback]

In these impassioned and inspiring essays, based on his 1993 Reith Lectures, Edward Said explores what it means to be an intellectual today. 

Are intellectuals merely the servants of special interests or do they have a larger responsibility? In these wide-ranging essays, one of our most brilliant and fiercely independent public thinkers addresses this question with extraordinary eloquence. Said sees the the intellectual as an exile and amateur whose role it is to speak the truth to power even at the risk of ostracism or imprisonment. Drawing on the examples of Jonathan Swift and Theodor Adorno, Robert Oppenheimer and Henry Kissinger, Vietnam and the Gulf War, Said explores the implications of this idea and shows what happens when intellectuals succumb to the lures of money, power, or specialization. Bracing and heartfelt. . . . A fiercely assertive description of the intellectual as an oppositional figure. --The New Yorker

Edward Said is the most distinguished cultural critic now writing in America. --Cornel West

Said is a brilliant and unique amalgam of scholar, aesthete and political activist. . . . He challenges and stimulated our thinking in every area. --Washington Post Book WorldEdward W. Said was born in 1935 in Jerusalem, raised in Jerusalem and Cairo, and educated in the United States, where he attended Princeton (B.A. 1957) and Harvard (M.A. 1960; Ph.D. 1964). In 1963, he began teaching at Columbia University, where he was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature. He died in 2003 in New York City.

He is the author of twenty-two books which have been translated into 35 languages, includingOrientalism(1978);The Question of Palestine(1979);Covering Islam(1980);The World, the Text, and the Critic(1983); Culture and Imperialism(1993);Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine and the Middle East Peace Process(1996); and