Writers and Missionaries - Essays on the Radical Imagination

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 Levi-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.

About the author

Adam Shatz is the US editor of The London Review of Books and a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and other publications. He is also the host of the podcast "Myself with Others".

Product details

• Authors: Adam Shatz, Shatz Adam
• Publisher: Verso
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 01.05.2023
• EAN: 9781804290590
• ISBN: 978-1-80429-059-0
• No. of pages: 368
• Dimensions: 159 mm x 241 mm x 25 mm
• Subjects: Education and learning > Teaching preparation > Vocational needs; Fiction > Poetry, drama; Essays, History of Ideas, PHILOSOPHY / History & Surveys / Modern, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Terrorism, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Colonialism & Post-Colonialism, Philosophy, PHILOSOPHY / Essays, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Essays, HISTORY / Essays, Terrorism, armed struggle, Western philosophy from c 1800, Literary essays, National liberation & independence, post-colonialism, National liberation and independence