This chapter mines both the published work of Edward Said and his archived correspondence to articulate his shifting and developing attitude to a number of paradigms of literary analysis: notably poststructuralist thought and, also, the idea of authorial intention. Said can be seen to have responded to Barthes in 1973’s book Beginnings: Intention and Method wherein he made the case for a way of thinking about the “appetite to begin” as an important way of reconceiving intentionalism anew. The chapter draws on key lines of thought at crucial junctures in Said’s career, from the essays of The World, The Text, and the Critic—where, among much else, Said drew on medieval Islamic scholarship and its various attitudes to text and interpretation—the masterful work of Orientalism, the construction of Beginnings, and it tracks attempts to problematize and critique poststructuralism in later works such as Culture and Imperialism.