4 Quotes & Sayings By Jean Said Makdisi

Born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1935, Jean Said Makdisi received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1973. He has taught at the University of Texas at Austin since 1972, where he is now Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature. His research interests include nineteenth-century British literature, the history of the novel, and the novels of Graham Greene. He has published widely on these subjects both in scholarly journals and general publications Read more

His first book was a monograph on W. B. Yeats, but he is best known for The Conflict Between Wordsworth's Poetry and Painting (Yale University Press).

The Conflict was awarded the American Academy of Arts & Letters' Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinguished contribution to scholarship. His most recent book is a biography of W. B.

Yeats (Yale University Press)

1
Thus did I receive, through the singing of these various hymns and the moral education that accompanied them, not only a religious, but a political schooling of sorts. For though the intertwining of morality and politics does not necessarily make for a clear understanding of the cynicism that governs world affairs., it does engender impatience with and a rejection of this cynicism, and a real belief in a more perfect, less unjust world. And though I regret not having been taught more about the real world, I have never regretted being taught this kind of morality first. Jean Said Makdisi
2
I had been brought up to be something of an intellectual, but there seemed at the time no connection between my newly formed ideas and the world to which I had returned. Indeed, I did not even recognize my ideas as ideas at all: they seemed to be culled from somewhere else and did not belong to me. I did not know then what I am just beginning to know now: that my ideas were indeed mine, that I had reacted and changed and moved, that I had already analyzed and synthesized, rejecting some thoughts, adopting others, putting yet others away for a while to be thought on. I did not recognize how mentally active an individual I had become, already divorced from the world through my own thoughts, my own perceptions of right and wrong, of honour and justice, of what mattered and what did not. (2007: 117) . Jean Said Makdisi
3
Is it not true that in ancient times the worst punishment of all was not death, but banishment? Jean Said Makdisi