Hearing a Voice, Being a Book: Jonathan Swift, Edward Said and the Practice of Literature

Helen Deutsch
University of California, Los Angeles

This talk, a taste of Helen Deutsch’s book tentatively titled The Last Amateur, puts two modes of reading into the balance. The first conceives of reading as hearing a voice, a living encounter with an author that precedes and precludes fixed meaning. The second explores the imaginative resources, what Deutsch is tempted to call a dream language, that Swift’s writing provided Said, whose childhood fantasy of being a book informed his life-long commitment to literature and to humanism. The music of Swift’s irony, along with the inventiveness of his thought, shaped Said’s redemptive idea of counterpoint. Deutsch’s counterpoint of Swift and Said imagines the practice of literature as a kind of embodied music.

Reception to follow the talk.