The Sublime Lyrical Abstractions of Edward W. Said

For three decades or so, the complex harmonies of Edward Said's published meditations--writing that spans a remarkable range of subjects with no less remarkable intellectual control-have gathered a momentum (an elaborate conceptual entanglement) that now approximates a fully manifested symphonic edifice. Said's themes have probed literary problems and theoretical rarefactions, philosophical tangles and political quagmires. Said has searched out, and examined with analytic imagination, the cultural contexts of the institutional authority that enables (and frequently disables) creative and intellectual work. His angle of witness has grounded itself within a quasi-autobiographical self-consciousness that is unique among academic writers. This self-referential mooring has never been out of proportion to the lived circumstances of its occasions. It has not dramatized itself as a

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