Edward Said and the religious effects of culture / William D. Hart.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hart, William David, author.

Series:

Cambridge studies in religion and critical thought ; 8.

Cambridge studies in religion and critical thought ; 8

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Said, Edward W.

Religion--Philosophy.

Religion.

Secularism.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xiii, 236 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Other Title:

Edward Said & the Religious Effects of Culture

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

This book provides a distinctive account of Edward Said's critique of modern culture by highlighting the religion-secularism distinction on which it is predicated. This distinction is both literal and figurative. It refers, on the one hand, to religious traditions and to secular traditions and, on the other hand, to tropes that extend the meaning and reference of religion and secularism in indeterminate ways. The author takes these tropes as the best way of organizing Said's heterogeneous corpus - from Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, his first book, to Orientalism, his most influential book, to his recent writings on the Palestinian question. The religion-secularism distinction, as an act of imagination and narrative continuity, lies behind Said's cultural criticism, his notion of intellectual responsibility, and his public controversy with Michael Walzer about the meaning and the uses of the Exodus story and about the question of Palestine.

Contents:

Preliminary remarks

Culture as the transfiguration of religious thought

The religious effects of culture: nationalism

The religious effects of culture: Orientalism

The religious effects of culture: imperialism

The responsibilities of the secular critic

Marx, Said, and the Jewish question

Concluding remarks: religion, secularism, and pragmatic naturalism

Whose exodus, which interpretation?

An exchange of letters between Michael Walzer and Edward Said.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Includes bibliographical references (p. 228-234) and index.

ISBN:

1-107-11899-9

0-511-17274-5

0-511-48841-6

0-511-31075-7

1-280-42114-2

0-521-77052-1

0-511-15159-4

0-511-04934-X

OCLC:

437072477