Ihab Hassan
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ihab Hassan (born 1925) is an Egyptian literary theorist.
He was born in Cairo, Egypt, and emigrated to the United States in 1946. Currently he is Vilas Research Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His writings include Radical Innocence: The Contemporary American Novel (1961), The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (1971) and The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture (1987).
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.
| 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-Differance / Trace |
| God the Father | The Holy Ghost |
| Metaphysics | Irony |
| Determinacy | Indeterminacy |
| Transcendence | Immanence |
