Edward Said has restored the world and worldliness to texts and their readers. This book studies Said in terms of his lesser known or often neglected works like Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography(1967) and Beginnings(1975), along with popular works like Orientalism (1978). A key focus of the book is how Said visualizes the role of the intellectual in the increasingly conformist contemporary world. Finally, all these facets are explored keeping in view the fact that Said has been a critic of the idea of canonicity of all types, and has given a viable to the canonical in terms of the contrapuntal.