Ihab Hassan

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

[edit] Biography
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 seeks to explain the
differences, both concrete and abstract, between modernism and postmodernism.

[edit] Hassan's table of differences between modernism

and postmodernism
Modernism

Romanticism/Symbolism

Postmodernism

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
2

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