Exile, Cosmopolitanism and the Diasporic Intellectual:

The Example of Edward Said

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to study Said’s career as literary critic and theorist stimulated by creativity by not being “quite right” and inspirational because “out of place” It will range throughout his works, taking in everything-from his first work, Joseph Conrad and the Fictions of Autobiography (1967) to his posthumously published final books, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2005) and On Late Style (2006) to demonstrate how he has made out of his uprooted condition and diasporic imaginings a contrapuntal mode of criticism, a skeptical engagement with the western world, and a constant, restless quest for the right to be engaged with the world because he finds it out of place and because he would like to intervene in it to draw attention to at least some of the places where he finds it is askew if only to change it.