Edward Said is most associated in his academic work with 'postcolonial theory'. This is due to the stunning success and influence of his 1978 book, Orientalism. He followed this work up with Culture and Imperialism in 1993. Both are major works of scholarship and critique, and, while they have both come up for severe critique on multiple fronts, they remain powerful, deeply impressive and important books.
Yet the association of Said with postcolonial studies was always in many ways problematic. The sheer volume of atttention paid these two books often blotted out his voluminous other work - his early engagement with Joseph Conrad, in Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography; his extraordinary and rich confrontation with the history of the novel, with the legacies of Romance philology and the excitement of structuralism and poststructuralism; his prodigious readings of writers as various as Nietzsche, Vico, Freud, Foucault and Conrad, Dickens, Hopkins, Mann - all in Beginnings. And then his brilliant essays on radical criticism and its institutionalisation collected in The World, the Text, and the Critic, his beautiful and allusive writing about Palestine in After the Last Sky; his copious writing about music, his memoir, Out of Place; and his latter preoccupation with 'late style', which issued in superb essays on Adorno, Fanon, Mann, Freud, Mozart, Lampedusa. Said's talents and interests always overflowed the boundaries of postcolonial studies. It was this, of course, which made him an 'intellectual' as against just an academic or scholar - his ambition and range, his sense of the politics of knowledge, his willingness and courage in speaking to general audiences beyond the seminar room, his possession not just of one register or style, but a whole medley of them, which enabled him to address Egyptian literature, Kierkegaard's philosophy and CNN if not at once then consecutively, never missing a beat.
So while I admire the 'postcolonial' work (though it is painfully noticeable that for many many years it was possible for fellow scholars to discuss Said's postcolonial work while never recognsing that his large body of writing on Palestine was also 'postcolonial' work, or, more accurately, anti-colonial writing - this was the extraordinary oversight and bad faith of Aijaz Ahmad) I also get enthusiastic and excited when I see new treatments of Said which resist the powerful undertow which requires most discussion of him to focus on Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism.
Two such books are Helen Deutsch's long-awaited (by me, anyway!) The Last Amateur: Jonathan Swift, Edward Said and the Profession of Literature, which came out in June, and Daniel Rosenberg Nutters's The Humanist Critic, which appeared just this month. Neither book works within the 'poco' subfield, though Nutters and Deutsch are well aware of this element in Said's intellectual identity. I pitched a review of the two books to the Los Angeles Review of Books, and that review has now been published.
Deutsch's book is surely one of the most unusual, 'un-professional' and original works of criticism of recent times. Deutsch openly presents her engagement with Said and Swift as deeply personal, as partly archive based, and as political in the widest sense. A scholar of the English 18th century but also a devotee of Jonathan Swift, one of the greatest of Irish writers, Deutsch describes how reading and then learning more about Said's life-long preoccupation with the Irishman's blistering poetry and polemics re-envlivend her interest in Swift, gave her a new sense of the disicplinary politics of her field (often very conservative and gendered), and helped her find her own public and political voice. The result is a striking and itself enlivening book.
Nutters's book is organised more conventionally but it also brings into focus, no less than Deutsch's work, Said's relationship with and learning from a writer who could not be more different from the volcanic and splenetic Swift: Lionel Trilling, maybe the greatest of the 'New York intellectuals'. Yet the fact is that Trilling and Said were colleagues at Columbia, and they shared many interests in their work. Nutters reads Trilling through his work on Arnold and Mann, and Said through his work on Conrad and Hopkins. The result is a set of fascinating new conjugations of Said's writing and career.
Here is my review at the LARB. It concentrates chiefly on the Nutters volume, but this should not be taken in any way as a slight on Helen Deutsch's rich book.
All contributors to journals like the LARB are indebted to the skills and patience of editors. Rob Latham took my initially rather orotund article, and shortened but sharpened it. I am greatly in his debt.
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