Beginnings: Intention and Method

From one of the world's most beloved and outspoken public intellectuals comes an illuminating book on the nature of criticism

"Readers will be surprised, stimulated, instructed, impressed."―The New Yorker

“What is a beginning? What must one do in order to begin? What is special about beginning as an activity or a moment or a place?”

So begins Beginnings, a scintillating work of criticism by Edward W. Said, author of Orientalism, The Question of Palestine, and other seminal works, and one of the most lauded public intellectuals of our time. Tracing humankind’s diverse understandings of what it means to begin throughout history, Said argues that “beginning” is itself a method, the first step in the creation of meaning. It’s what sparks a break from preexisting tradition, and it’s what authorizes new texts to be.

As ever, Said insists on a criticism that is both humane and socially responsible. Beginnings is about much more than writing: it is about imagination and action as well as the constraints on freedom and invention that come from achieving human intention. The result is a classic and necessary treatise on the role of the intellectual and the worth of criticism.

EDWARD W. SAID was born in 1935 in Jerusalem, raised in Jerusalem and Cairo, and educated in the United States, where he attended Princeton (B.A. 1957) and Harvard (M.A. 1960; Ph.D. 1964). In 1963, he began teaching at Columbia University, where he was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature. He is the author of twenty-two books which have been translated into thirty-five languages, including Orientalism (1978); The Question of Palestine (1979); Covering Islam (1980); The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983); Culture and Imperialism (1993); Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine and the Middle East Peace Process (1996); and Out of Place: A Memoir (1999). He died in 2003 in New York City.