by Avihu Zakai Edward Said (1935-2003), Palestinian-American scholar, activist, and for many years Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, had a deep interest in the close connection between literature and exile, a subject that occupied much of his life of the mind since the time he was a graduate student at Harvard in the late fifties. Said’s overarching goal in many of his studies is to relate the experience of exilic displacement, a theme that stems from his own displacement from Palestine. “The novelty of our time,” he wrote in the introduction to Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (2000), is “that so many individuals have experienced the uprooting and dislocations that have made them expatriate and exiles.” He aligned himself with such exiled intellectuals as Joseph Conrad, James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov,...

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