Features of Modernism

Ihab Hassan
The Dismemberment of Orpheus. Toward a
Postmodern Literature
POSTFACE 1982. Toward Postmodernism
The University of Wisconsin Press, 1982
Modernism vs. Postmodernism

↕ ↔
• Rhetoric
• Linguistics
• Literary theory
• Philosophy
• Anthropology
• Psychoanalysis
• Political science
• Theology
 Romanticism/ Symbolism
‘Pataphysics’/ Dadaism
• Freedom of individual self-expression (sincerity, spontaneity, originality);
• Emotional directness of personal experience;
• Boundlessness of individual imagination and aspiration;
• Interest in the irrational realms of dream and delirium, folk superstition and
legend;
• Poetry of suggestion rather than that of direct statement;
• Evoking subjective moods while avoiding the description of external reality;
• Bringing poetry closer to music;
• Use of free verse and prose poem;
• Inspired by Baudelaire’s theory of ‘correspondences’ between physical and
spiritual realms and between the difference senses (synaesthesia).
vs.
• A parody of the theory and methods of modern science often expressed in
nonsensical language. (‘Pataphysics – term coined by the French writer
Alfred Jarry to designate what lies beyond metaphysics)
• Anarchic protest against bourgeois society, religion and art → nihilism
• Experimenting with anti-logical poetry and collage pictures and sculptures.
 Form (conjunctive, closed)
Antiform (disjunctive, open)

• The structure or unifying principle of

design in a given work.
• The way something is said in contrast to
what is said.
• Organisation, structure (centred structure),
hierarchy
 Purpose
Play

• “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse

of the Human Sciences” in Jacques
Derrida, Writing and Difference
• Design, organisation, structure
• Meaning as a result of a conscious choice
of method with a view to expressing an
artistic faith
 Design
Chance
• The process of deciding how something will be
made, how it will work and what it will look like.
• It is the result of a clearly formulated intention,
which implies a conscious choice of method to
produce a certain effect on the reader/ viewer.
vs.
• Chance combination of elements or components
whose meaning and effect depend upon the
reader’s/ viewer’s willingness to get involved in
the process of meaning creation.
 Hierarchy
Anarchy

• Clear subordination of certain elements to

other elements.
• Subordination → domination → relations
of the superior-inferior type.
vs.
• Situation in which there is no government
and no control normal rules and laws
being definitely ignored.
 Mastery/ Logos
Exhaustion/ Silence
• ‘Logos’ – ‘word’ (Greek) → logocentrism
• In philosophy, ‘logos’ is an ultimate principle of
truth or reason.
• In Christian theology it refers to the Word of God
as the origin and foundation of all things.
• The philosophical ‘metaphysics of presence’
craves a ‘transcendental signified’ or ultimately
self-sufficient meaning (God, Man, Truth).
 Art Object/ Finished Work
Process/ Performance/ Happening

• Relation between writer or producer and

reader in the process of meaning creation.
• Meaning is the result of the writer’s
decision on how to express what in order
to transmit his/ her artistic faith.
• Finished does not exclude the possibility of
multiple interpretations.
• Significance vs. signification.
 Distance
Participation
• Relation between writer and reader in the
process of meaning creation.
• The writer is a producer of meanings. The reader
is a consumer of meanings. The work is the
carrier of meaning.
vs.
• Meaning is the result of a necessary encounter
and interaction between producer and receiver.
• Meaning does not exist, it emerges during the
process of negotiation between producer and
receiver of the text.
 Creation/ Totalization
Decreation/ Deconstruction
• Related to the Western ‘logocentric’ tradition of thought
that tried to establish grounds of certainty and truth by
repressing the limitless instability of language.
• Search for some absolute source or guarantee of
meaning which could centre or stabilize the uncertainties
of signification.
• Hierarchies privileging a central term over a marginal one.
• Author’s intention
• The external world as a source of meaning in texts.
• The work of art as a form of knowledge.
 Synthesis
Antithesis

• Combination of different ideas or styles

that forms a new idea or style.
• Unifying different points of view.
• Reprocessing the old into the new.
 Presence
Absence
• Centre as presence – essence, existence,
substance, subject, truth, transcendentality,
consciousness, conscience, God, man.
• The centre had no natural, fixed locus, but a
function, “a sort of non-locus in which an infinite
number of sign-substitutions came into play.[…]
The absence of the transcendental signified
extends the domain and the interplay of
signification ad infinitum” (J.Derrida)
 Centering
Dispersal

• “the centre, which is by definition unique,

constituted that very thing within a
structure which governs the structure,
while escaping structurality.” (J.Derrida)
• Centred structure – “a freeplay which is
constituted upon a fundamental immobility
and a reassuring certitude.” (J. Derrida)
 Genre/ Boundary
Text/ Intertext
• Set of well defined conventions, distinguishing
one work from another. The choice of a certain
convention conveys a certain meaning and
creates a certain image of the external reality.

• Intertextuality ( term coined by Julia Kristeva) –

the various relationships that a given text may
have with other texts (allusion, translation,
parody, pastiche, imitation). A text is seen to
refer to other texts or to itself as a text rather
than to an external reality.
 Semantics
Rhetoric

• Semantics – the philosophical or linguistic

study of meanings in language.
vs.
• Rhetoric – the deliberate exploitation of
eloquence for the most persuasive effect
in public speaking or in writing.
- those aspects of the work that
persuade or otherwise guide the
responses of readers.
 Paradigm
Syntagm
• Paradigm – all words sharing the same
grammatical function, since the substitution of
one for another does not disturb the syntax of a
sentence.
• The paradigmatic dimension of language – the
vertical axis of selection.
• Syntagm – any combination of units which are
arranged in a significant sequence.
• The syntagmatic dimension of language – the
horizontal axis of combination.
 Hypotaxis
Parataxis
• The use of connecting words between clauses
and sentences explicitly showing the logical or
other relationships between them.
• Use of syntactic subordination of one clause to
another.
vs.
• The juxtaposition of clauses or sentences.
• The lack of obvious connection between
sentences.
 Metaphor
Metonymy
• Metaphor: the figure of speech in which one
thing, idea, or action is referred to by a word or
expression normally denoting another thing,
idea, or action, so as to suggest some common
quality shared by the two.
• Metonymy: the figure of speech that replaces the
name of one thing with the name of something
else closely associated with it.
• The metaphor establishes relationships of
similarity between two things. The metonymy
establishes relationships of contiguity between
two things.
 Selection
Combination

• Paradigmatic vs. syntagmatic

• Meaningful vs. meaningless
• Scepticism about the meaningfulness of
words.
 Root/ Depth
Rhizome/ Surface

• Origin
• Meaning underlying all things.
• Relation between the visible and the
invisible.
• Everything has an origin or a cause.
 Interpretation/ Reading
Against Interpretation/ Misreading

• Presupposes the existence of a

transcendental meaning, the artist’s aim
being to help reveal it by the work of art.
 Signified
Signifier

• Ferdinand de Saussure
• The sign has two inseparable aspects:
– The signified (signifié) – the conceptual
component, the idea conventionally indicated
by the signifier.
– The signifier (signifiant) – the materially
perceptible component, a sound, a letter, or a
sequence of letters making up a word.
 Lisible/ Readerly
Scriptible/ Writerly
• Roland Barthes – S/Z (1970)
• Term applied to texts usually of the realist tradition that
involve no true participation from the reader other than
the consumption of a fixed meaning.
• The readerly text can be understood in terms of already
familiar conventions and expectations.
• The writerly text challenges the reader to produce its
meanings from an ‘open’ play of possibilities.
• Jouissance vs. plaisir (Roland Barthes – Le plaisir du
texte 1973)
 Narrative/ Grande Histoire
Anti-narrative/ Petite Histoire
• Jean François Lyotard – The Postmodern
Condition: A Report on Knowledge
• Meta-narrative – large-scale theories or
philosophies of the world, the progress of history,
the knowability of all things by science, the
possibility of absolute freedom to account for the
meaning of us all.
• The small histories account for difference,
diversity, incompatibility of beliefs, ideas, and
desires.
 Master Code
Idiolect

• The universally accepted language of the

meta-narratives, implying creation,
totalization.
vs.
• The particular variety of a language used
by an individual speaker or writer, pointing
to difference, variety, and individual
identity.
 Symptom
Desire

• The sign of a larger problem.

vs.
• The strong feeling of wanting to do or have
somenthing.
 Type
Mutant

• A group of people or things with similar

qualities or features that make them
different from other groups vs. an
individual different from others of its type
as a result a change in its genes.
• Otherness
• Norm
• Difference as deviation from the norm
• Essentialist vs. non-essentialist
 Genital/ Phallic
Polymorphous/ Androgynous

• Creation, origin, cause, Genesis.

vs.

• Changing form, neither male nor female,

yet both male and female.
 Paranoia
Schizophrenia
• The mental illness that makes people believe
that other people do not like them and want to
harm them.
• Ignorance and fear of the Other.
vs.
• A serious mental illness in which the way you
think and feel is not connected with what is really
happening.
• Multiplication of the self → provisional selves.
 Origin/ Cause
Difference-Differance/ Trace
• Centre, presence, centred structure, sign, meaning,
meaningfulness
vs.
• Dispersal, absence, freeplay
• Différance = differ + defer
• No linguistic element has a positive meaning, only an
effect of meaning arising from its differences from other
elements.
• Presence of meaning is deferred from one sign to
another in an endless sequence. By spacing out the
signified and the signifier, meaning appears only as a
‘trace’ of other terms within or across any given term.
 God the Father
The Holy Ghost

• God the Father – the origin of what is

subject to Him, the supreme and most
powerful authority.
• The Holy Ghost – the spirit of God.
 Metaphysics
Irony

• The part of philosophy that studies what is

real and what stands outside the physical
world.
• Relation literature/ fiction – reality
 Determinacy
Indeterminacy

• “ambiguity, discontinuity, heterodoxy,

pluralism, randomness, revolt, perversion,
deformation (decreation, disintegration,
deconstruction, decenterment,
displacement, difference, discontinuity,
disjunction, disappearance,
decomposition, de-definition,
demystification, detotalization,
deligitimation).” (Ihab Hassan)
 Transcendence
Immanence
• Logocentrism – the desire for a centre or original
guarantee of all meanings.
• ‘transcendental signified’ – God, Truth, Man.
• Immanent – operating within a domain of reality
or realm of discourse; existing in consciousness
or the mind and not in an extra-mental world vs.
transcendent – to be prior to, beyond and
above the universe of material existence, beyond
the limits of all possible experience and
knowledge.