All my readers know that I am a keen reader and admirer of Edward Said. I've been reading his work for a long time, and I've written about his work a fair bit. So I've also got a good grip on the expanding literature on Said. And in that literature, no writer has been of greater importance for me than Timothy Brennan. A former student of Said's, Brennan has been writing intelligently and in an original way about Said since the early 1990s. In a body of work which is still often composed of ideological or disciplinary policing of Said - he is insufficiently Marxist or Foucauldian, or his readings of Dickens or Austen or Kipling displease the professional Victorianists or theorists of the novel - Brennan's essays and treatments of Said have always stood out as reaching beyond these local critiques and taking hold of the major issues at stake in his work and positions. This is not to say that Brennan has been uncritical - as a Marxist scholar, he has taken Said's partial appropriations of Lukacs, Gramsci or Adorno on and pointed out his weaknesses with a finely judged mix of rigour and sympathy.
Accordingly, when I learned a few years ago that Brennan was writing a biography of Said, I was very excited (not to mention a little envious). Here was a writer who I felt could do justice to the wide range of Said's interests and activities. And Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said is no disappointment - it powerfully and often radically illuminates aspects of Said's work and thought which have mostly hitherto been hidden. No one book that is not of Proustian proportions could cover 'all' of Said's life, thoughts or doings. Timothy Brennan's book gives us a rich portrait to learn from and explore.
I've reviewed this book for the redoubtable Dublin Review of Books, Ireland's best literary journal. Warm thanks go to Maurice Earls for his help in making this review possible.
Conor
No comments:
Post a Comment