Includes bibliographical references and index.

Labyrinth of incarnations: the esays of Maurice Merleau-Ponty -- Sense and sensibility: on R.P. Blackmur, Georges Poulet, and E.D. Hirsch -- Amateur of the insoluble: on E.M. Cioran -- A standing civil war: on T.E. Lawrence -- Arabic prose and prose fiction after 1948 -- Between chance and determinism: Lukaćs's Aesthetik -- Conrad and Nietzsche -- Vico on the discipline of bodies and texts -- Tourism among the dogs: on George Orwell -- Bitter dispatches from the Third World -- Grey Eminence: on Walter Lippmann -- Among the believers: on V.S. Naipaul -- Opponents, audiences, constituencies, and community -- Bursts of meaning: on John Berger and Jean Mohr -- Egyptian rites -- The future of criticism -- Reflections on exile -- Michel Foucault, 1927-1984 -- Orientalism reconsidered -- Remembrances of things played: presence and memory in the pianist's art: on Glenn Gould -- How not to get gored: on Ernest Hemingway -- Foucault and the imagination of power -- The horizon of R.P. Blackmur -- Cairo recalled: growing up in the cultural crosscurrents of 1940s Egypt -- Through gringo eyes: with Conrad in Latin America -- The quest for Gillo Pontecorvo -- Representing the colonized: anthropology's interlocutors -- After Mahfouz -- Jungle calling: on Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan -- Cairo and Alexandria -- Homage to a belly-dancer: on Tahia Carioca -- Introduction to Moby-Dick -- The politics of knowledge -- Identity, authority, and freedom: the potentate and the traveler -- The Anglo-Arab encounter: on Ahdaf Soueif -- Nationalism, human rights, and interpretation -- Traveling theory reconsidered -- History, literature, and geography -- Contra mundum: on Eric Hobsbawm -- Bach's genius, Schumann's eccentricity, Chopin's ruthlessness, Rosen's gift -- Fantasy's role in the making of nations: on Jacqueline Rose -- On defiance and taking positions -- From silence to sound and back again: music, literature, and history -- On lost causes -- Between worlds -- The clash of definitions: on Samuel Huntington.