Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal. You are a very special breed, or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read?

From KCRW Santa Monica, you're listening to Bookworm.

I'm Michael Silverblatt.

Today my guest is Edward W. Said, who is speaking by phone from Columbia University in New York City. His many books

include beginnings, intention, and method, orientalism, and culture and imperialism. Out of place,

a memoir, and the Syed reader are available from vintage. Power, politics, and culture,

interviews with Edward W. Said is published by Pantheon. I have a funny

relationship myself with the work of Mr. Said. I was a graduate student in the State University of New

York at Buffalo, and for the entire year before his first major post-dissertation work appeared, we were receiving as

if urgent missives, chapters of Edward Said's beginning intention and method to read.

The book was expected by my professors, among them Eugenio Donado, René Girard, Homer Brown,

to be the next step in what was then hermeneutical criticism.

While beginnings opened the door and oversaw a huge territory of possibilities in literary

criticism, it was Said's next book, Orientalism, that by choosing a particular entrance

really did revolutionize the field of literary criticism, bringing in

what now is known as post-colonial criticism.

What followed were works that brought Said as an intellectual into the forefront of cultural commentary.

His books began to alternate between commentaries on the politics of Palestinians

and their world situation.

Literary criticism works on the position of the intellectual,

...