Beginnings: Intention and Method

Front Cover
Basic Books, 1975 - Literary Criticism - 414 pages
This reissued classic traces the ramifications and diverse understandings of the concept of "beginning" in history and offers valuable insights into the role of the intellectual and the goal of criticism.

From inside the book

 

Contents

CHAPTER
27
The Novel as Beginning Intention 79
79
Beginning with a Text
189
Copyright

4 other sections not shown

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Beginnings: Intention and Method
Edward W. Said
Limited preview - 1985
Beginnings: Intention and Method
Edward W. Said
Snippet view - 1975

Common terms and phrases

action activity authority autodidact Barthes become beginning called career chapter character complex concept Conrad consciousness continuity Costaguana course created critic Decoud describe discontinuity discourse divine dream Erich Auerbach essay example existence experience fact father fiction Foucault Freud Giambattista Vico Gould Heart of Darkness Hopkins human Ibid idea imaginative individual intention interpretation Interpretation of Dreams Joseph Conrad Jude the Obscure knowledge language Lévi-Strauss linguicity linguistic literary literature Mallarmé man's meaning method mind modern narrative nature Nietzsche Nostromo notion novel novelistic object original philology philosopher poem poet poetic possible present problem produced R. P. Blackmur radical reader reality relationships repetition Science seems sense signifies sort speaking statement structuralist structure Sulaco T. E. Lawrence temporal text's textual textual criticism things thought tradition trans truth unconscious University Press Valéry verbal Vico Vico's words writing

References to this book

About the author (1975)

Born in Jerusalem and educated at Victoria College in Cairo and at Princeton and Harvard universities, Edward Said has taught at Columbia University since 1963 and has been a visiting professor at Harvard and Johns Hopkins University. He has had an unusual dual career as a professor of comparative literature, a recognized expert on the novelist and short story writer Joseph Conrad, (see Vol. 1) and as one of the most significant contemporary writers on the Middle East, especially the Palestinian question and the plight of Palestinians living in the occupied territories. Although he is not a trained historian, his Orientalism (1978) is one of the most stimulating critical evaluations of traditional Western writing on Middle Eastern history, societies, and literature. In the controversial Covering Islam (1981), he examined how the Western media have biased Western perspectives on the Middle East. A Palestinian by birth, Said has sought to show how Palestinian history differs from the rest of Arabic history because of the encounter with Jewish settlers and to present to Western readers a more broadly representative Palestinian position than they usually obtain from Western sources. Said is presently Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia, editor of Arab Studies Quarterly, and chair of the board of trustees of the Institute of Arab Studies. He is a member of the Palestinian National Council as well as the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

Bibliographic information

TitleBeginnings: Intention and Method
AuthorEdward W. Said
PublisherBasic Books, 1975
Original fromthe University of Michigan
DigitizedMay 16, 2008
ISBN0465005802, 9780465005802
Length414 pages
Subjects › 

Literary Criticism / General
  
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