Ihab Hassan

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

Ihab H. Hassan (born in 1925) is an American literary theorist and writer born in Egypt.

He was born in Cairo, Egypt, and emigrated to the United States in 1946. Currently he is Emeritus Vilas Research Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His writings include Radical Innocence: The Contemporary American Novel (1961), The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett (1967), The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (1971, 1982), Paracriticisms: Seven Speculations of the Times (1975), The Right Promethean Fire: Imagination, Science, and Cultural Change (1980), The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture (1987), Selves at Risk: Patterns of Quest in Contemporary American Letters (1990), and Rumors of Change: Essays of Five Decades (1995), as well as two memoirs, Out of Egypt: Scenes and Arguments of an Autobiography (1985) and Between the Eagle and the Sun: Traces of Japan (1996). Recently, he has published short fiction in various literary magazines. His most recent work is "In Quest of Nothing: Selected Essays, 1998-2008." In addition, he has written more than 300 essays and reviews on literary and cultural subjects.

Hassan received honorary degrees from the University of Uppsala (Sweden) and the University of Giessen (Germany), two Guggenheim Fellowships, and three Senior Fulbright Lectureships. He has also received the Alumni Teaching Award and the Honors Program Teaching Award at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, where he has taught for 29 years. In addition he has delivered more than 500 public lectures in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand.

The following table is taken from a part of The Dismemberment of Orpheus that was reprinted in Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology (1998). It has helped many students understand the differences, both concrete and abstract, between modernism and postmodernism.

[edit] Hassan's table of differences between modernism and postmodernism

Modernism Postmodernism
Romanticism/Symbolism Pataphysics/Dadaism
Form (conjunctive, closed) Antiform (disjunctive, open)
Purpose Play
Design Chance
Hierarchy Anarchy
Mastery/Logos Exhaustion/Silence
Art Object / Finished Work Process/Performance/Happening
Distance Participation
Creation/Totalization Decreation/Deconstruction
Synthesis Antithesis
Presence Absence
Centering Dispersal
Genre/Boundary Text/Intertext
Semantics Rhetoric
Paradigm Syntagm
Hypotaxis Parataxis
Metaphor Metonymy
Selection Combination
Root/Depth Rhizome/Surface
Interpretation/Reading Against Interpretation / Misreading
Signified Signifier
Lisible (Readerly) Scriptable (Writerly)
Narrative / Grande Histoire Anti-narrative / Petit Histoire
Master Code Idiolect
Symptom Desire
Type Mutant
Genital/Phallic Polymorphous/Androgynous
Paranoia Schizophrenia
Origin / Cause Difference-Difference / Trace
God the Father The Holy Ghost
Metaphysics Irony
Determinacy Indeterminacy
Transcendence Immanence

[edit] External links

Personal tools