The purpose of this chapter is, as our first extended examination of Said's writings and ideas, to sketch out the manifold influences that help shape, and also are re-inflected in, that work. Said had a long and varied career as academic critic, political analyst, and public intellectual, and he absorbed and re-processed various intellectual currents and traditions over that period. It has often been said of him, even by his admirers, that his work was characterised by eclecticism. Here, however, we may be able to discern a greater continuity than is conventionally allowed to him.

Schematically, Said's literary criticism borrowed from and was influenced by a wide variety of the critical schools and trends of the twentieth century: Romance philology, phenomenology, Western Marxism, structuralism, and poststructuralism. But he was also acutely attuned to various strands in music criticism and musicology, and he was widely read in sociology, history, anthropology, philosophy, and political theory. More than most Anglophone critics, Said practised interdisciplinarity on a grand scale. Frequently, this got him into trouble with specialists in disciplinary areas on which he cheerfully trespassed. But for Said, this kind of ‘interference’ was close to a kind of methodological principle. Crossing over disciplinary boundaries, bringing disparate knowledges and epistemologies into unexpected conjunction, his work is concerned repeatedly not only with the production of knowledge, but with the conditions of possibility of the production of knowledge.