Recommendations from our site
“So the reason I chose Edward Said’s wonderful book, Representations of the Intellectual, is that he argues very forcibly for the value of intellectual life. There’s an attitude in the UK, that if you call yourself an intellectual, or say you are concerned with intellectual things, most people think that’s analogous to something mildly indecent. Said’s book—which was based on his Reith lecture series—is a fantastic portrait of an intellectual life, and intellectuals at work. One of the things he says is that part of an intellectual’s work is the art of representing the world, of stylizing it, of understanding ideas and conveying them to people. That is one of the things that is so brilliant about Said. He then takes a whole range of intellectuals—from Simone de Beauvoir to Jean Paul Sartre to James Baldwin—and talks about them and their craft of representing the world and representing their ideas.” Read more...
Les Back, Social Scientist
