Writers and Missionaries
Essays on the Radical Imagination
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
What does it mean to be a politically committed writer?
Through a close reading of the lives and works of some of the greatest intellectuals of recent times, Adam Shatz asks: do writers have an ethical imperative to question injustice? How can one remain a dispassionate thinker when involved in the cut and thrust of politics? And, in an age of horror and crisis, what does it mean to be a committed writer?
Shatz interrogates the major figures of twentieth and twenty-first century thought and finds within their lives and work the roots of our present intellectual and geopolitical situation.
Charting the role of the committed intellectual through the work of Jean-Paul Sartre on the Algerian War and Edward Said's lifelong solidarity with the Palestinian people, to Fouad Ajami's role as the "native informant" for pro-intervention cause in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, alongside philosophers and critics Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Claude Lévi-Strauss and the novelists Michel Houllebecq and Richard Wright, each struggled to reconcile their writing and their politics, their thought and their commitments.
Writers and Missionaries is an erudite and incisive work of intellectual elucidation and biographical enquiry that demands that we interrogate anew the relation of thought and action in the struggle for a more just world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In these thought-provoking essays, Shatz (Prophets Outcast), the U.S. editor of the London Review of Books, examines how the "lived experiences of writers" influenced their works and philosophies. He studies what the biographies of such intellectuals as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Edward Said, and Jean-Paul Sartre reveal about their writings, suggesting that Richard Wright's chagrin at the sentimental reception to his Uncle Tom's Children (Wright lamented that "even bankers' daughters could read and weep over and feel good about" the story collection) led him to write the deliberately provocative Native Son. Analyzing intellectual historian Fouad Ajami's oeuvre, Shatz contends that the Lebanese emigrant's desire to assimilate undergirded his transformation from a "judicious critic both of Arab society and of the West" into a hawkish supporter of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Other chapters discuss how Roland Barthes's anxiety over his inadequacy as a fiction writer inadvertently led him to invent autofiction and how expat William Gardner Smith's disenchantment with France, his adopted home, and the Algerian War inspired his autobiographical 1963 novel The Stone Face. The smart profiles offer revealing insight into how biography shapes ideology and art, though there is a conspicuous lack of women among the writers profiled (Egyptian feminist Arwa Salih is the sole woman). The result is a smart if limited look at how the political commitments of writers form.
