Scholar Sees Connections between Literature and Political Legitimacy

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IN "Prejudices" (1919), the splenetic American journalist and social critic H. L. Mencken wrote: "A great literature is chiefly the product of inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation."

"Culture and Imperialism" is Edward Said's rebuttal.

A public intellectual and literary theorist who describes himself as a Christian Arab exile in the United States, Said is a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York. He is probably best known as the West's media-savvy dean of Palestinian causes and friend of the Palestine Liberation Organization. On television and in print, he has insisted eloquently, and …