Summary
Columbia essayist and senior colleague of Edward Said, to whose memory Reflections on Exile and Other Essays is dedicated (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.3).
Details
- Dupee and Lionel Trilling were friends and solicitous senior colleagues of Said in the Columbia College English Department on Said’s arrival in New York (PDF p.8).
- Said describes Dupee as principally an essayist and a real subversive, less caught up than his New York intellectual colleagues in Anglophilia, narcissism and rightward-tending shifts, who encouraged Said’s interest in new French theorizing, experimental fiction and poetry, and the art of the essay (PDF p.8).
- After 1967 Dupee supported Said “in my lonely fight on behalf of the Palestinian cause” (PDF p.8), faithful to the radical, anti-authoritarian politics of his early Trotskyist years; Dupee and his wife Andy were the only friends from Said’s academic New York life to visit him in Beirut, in fall 1972 (PDF p.8-9).
- Dupee’s untimely death in 1979 was, for Said, an event of immense personal loss, still felt at the time of writing (PDF p.8).