Edward Said's Rhetoric of the Secular

Description

Edward Saids Rhetoric of the Secular provides an important new reading of Edward W. Saids work, emphasizing not only the distinction but also the fuzzy borders between representations of the religious and the secular found within and throughout his oeuvre and at the core of some of his most customary rhetorical strategies. Mathieu Courville begins by examining Saids own reflections on his life, before moving on to key debates about Saids work within Religious Studies and Middle Eastern Studies, and his relationship to French critical theorists. Through close attention to Saids use of the literal and the figurative when dealing with religious, national and cultural matters, Courville discerns a pattern that illuminates what Said means by secular. Saids work shows that the secular is not the utter opposite of religion in the modern globalized world, but may exist in a productive tension with it.