The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture

by Ihab Hassan

Philosophy, Essays, Cultural Studies

Genres: Theory, Philosophy, Cultural, Essays

288 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1987

About the author

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: Studies in 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 many short stories in various literary magazines and is completing a novel, The Changeling. His most recent work is In Quest of Nothing: Selected Essays, 1998-2008 (2010). 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 (1996) and the University of Giessen (1999), two Guggenheim Fellowships (1958, 1962), and three Senior Fulbright Lectureships (1966, 1974, 1975). He was on the Faculty of the School of Letters, Indiana University (1964), Visiting Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (1972), twice on the Faculty of the Salzburg Summer Seminars in American Studies (1965,1975), Senior Fellow at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis (1974–1975), Resident Scholar at the Rockefeller Study Center in Bellagio (1978), twice a Senior Fellow at the Humanities Research Center in Canberra (1990, 2003), Resident Fellow at the Humanities Research Institute of the University of California, Irvine (1990), on the Faculty of the Stuttgart Summer Seminars in Cultural Studies (1991), and three times on the Faculty of the Scandinavian Summer School of Literary Theory and Criticism in Karlskrona (2000, 20001, 2004). 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, 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.

Reviews

[Sadia]

Read a part of it for class. Did not make sense to me aaaa

[E. C. Koch · Rating 5 out of 5]

The critical literature on postmodernism is broad. Everyone has their own take, their own twist, their own coined neologism for what makes something pomo. These works, far more often than not, fall out of memory as quickly as they rise into the postmodern consciousness, a consciousness (being postmodern) ever-alert for the next new thing. And so postmodernism is exhausted, schizophrenic, incredulous, hyperreal, neo-avant-garde, neo-conservative, and neo-liberal by (very, very tight) turns. The critical literature on postmodernism is not deep. Critics, driven by the vicissitudes of tenure committees and university politics to distinguish themselves, seem rarely to unify their work with that of others, making the critical literature as ephemeral, as breathless, as its subject. (Right, like, maybe we all think pomo lit. is all the things we think it is because the criticism on it is superficial and anchorless and hyper-concerned with difference and wholly self-reflexive.) Hassan’s The Postmodern Turn is broad and deep. Maybe this is because his book is more of an anthology than a singular text (these ten chapters are all previously published articles from a fifteen-year span compiled together), which matters in the too-fast pomo crit. game. And I suspect this does help my sense of his text’s depth. But, then, so too does the feeling that he’s read everything (in their original languages) and has been around since the Renaissance and is just super judicious and gracious in his criticism. His recurring argument – his version of postmodernism – is what he calls “indetermanence” or the combined aesthetics of indeterminacy and immanence. To make his interpretation stick, though, he shows how both indeterminacy and immanence are synonymous with lots of other critics’ theories, how they’re all making the same fundamental observation. This practice of connection fashions a depth in his criticism that is largely absent from the greater critical literature. And while all of this is great, what really blew me away was his conclusion. Ultimately, Hassan argues for a “pragmatic pluralism” that recognizes the intransigence of certain of pomo’s features and “supervents” them by taking on faith. This is not a deluded, religious faith, but, instead, a collective recognition of the need for collective standards in the face of postmodern relativism. While Hassan doesn’t employ this term, I think of this popomo faith as being Sincerity, which makes this broad, deep, and totally ahead of its time.

[Маx Nestelieiev · Rating 5 out of 5]

гарне доповнення до його "Розчленування Орфея", Гассан тут уже підбиває підсумки й зрештою стає зрозуміло, що більше про постмодернізм йому вже нічого сказати. а найцінніше з його доробку - відома табличка "Модернізм/постмодернізм" - кращого він так нічого і не запропонував.

[T. Sendi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Only read his “Toward a Concept of Postmodernism” for my Modernism/Postmodernism class.

“We are all, I suspect, a little Victorian, Modern, and Postmodern, at once.”



Edit:
I am re-studying the essays for my final so I will dump in my understanding of it here:

Basically Hassan isn’t standing with either modernism or postmodernism, he is simply explaining the difference between the two. He is saying that Modernism has a fixed, structured meaning, with one truth— but postmodernism is chaotic and ironic. And language plays a big role, in modernism, its present (one of the words in the list) which I broke down according to my understanding and figured that for modernism they have to present the truth to readers, so they know exactly what the author meant. But for postmodernism (absence) you get to have different perspectives and understanding, each reader makes their own truth.

[Dylan · Rating 3 out of 5]

quotes:
Thus in Beckett, literature rigorously unmakes itself, and in miller, literature pretends erratically to be life.
In Cent Mille Millards de Poemes, Queneau has constructed a "poetry machine", ten overlapping pages of fourteen line sonnets, each line of which can be read in every possible combination with all other lines; the result takes two hundred million years to "read".
After the silence of Rimbaud, the blank page of Mallarmé, the inarticulate cry of Artaud, aliterature finally dissolves in alliteration with Joyce and for Beckett words all say the same thing.
Ruldolph Schwarzkogler slowly amputates his penis, and expires.
Modernism: Elitism, Irony, Abstraction; Style takes over; let life and the masses fend for themselves. Aristocratic and Crypto-Fascist.
The authority of modernism rests on intense, elitist, self-generated orders in times of crisis.
[Is posthumanism the fusion of modernism and postmodernism? Or is it the gentrification of postmodernism? Is it inherently a movement of conformity and defeat?]
Parodic Reflexiveness: multiple, fractured, and ambiguous perspectives.
The Re-Creation of Reality: the conventional ideas of time, place, character, and plot are shattered.
Nonlinear form: circular, simultaneous, coincident--a mesh or mosiac or montage or Moebius time strip of motifs
Characters are subject to a constant process of recurrence, metempsychosis, and superimposition; and opposites become the other
The actual and the possible, the historical and the fabulous have equal validity in eternity; in the gnostic view, fact and fiction fuse.
In a world of simultaneity, cause and effect coincide; eternity and the instant merge in the Perpetual Now, as in mystic doctrines; sequence becomes synchronicity.
Indeterminacy: all manners of ambiguities, ruptures, and displacements affecting knowledge and society. Kurt Gödel's proof of incompleteness, Thomas Kuhn's paradigms, and Paul Feyerabend's dadism of science. Harold Rosenberg's anxious art objects. Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogic imagination, Roland Barthes' textes scriptibles, Wolfgang Iser's literary Unbestimmtheiten, Harold Bloom's misprisons, Paul de Man's allegorical readings, Stanley Fish's affective stylistics, Norman Holland's transactive analysis, and David Bleich's subjective criticism.
Of American Marxism: And i find unsettling their concealed social determinism, collectivist bias, distrust of aesthetic pleasure, proclivity to rationalize or "blueprint" human reality, and readiness to confuse their beliefs with universal values and their theories with the irrefutable scheme of things.