Cioffi princeton university born in cairo, egypt, ihab hassan followed the path that many bright young egyptians took in the first half of this century: he trained to become an engineer. After graduating with highest honors from the university of cairo, hassan came to the united states to further his study of electrical engineering, and in 1948 he earned his ms in that field at the university of pennsylvania. Yet he continued on at penn, changing his field to something that spoke to him, evidently, more deeply than did engineering. He studied literature, and earned two degrees in english an ma in 1950 and a phd in 1953. After a brief period teaching at rensselaer polytechnic institute, hassan moved to wesleyan university, where he taught from 1954 1970. Since 1970, he has been the vilas research professor of english and comparative literature at the university of wisconsin milwaukee till his retirement in 19.

Essay About The Importance of Reading Newspaper

During his professional career, he has also held visiting professorships in sweden, japan, germany, france, and austria as well as at yale, trinity college, and the university of washington. Over the last forty years, hassan has won numerous awards and fellowships, including two guggenheim fellowships three senior fulbright lectureships national endowment for the humanities grants research appointments in france, england, italy, japan, australia, and ireland and several teaching awards. He was awarded honorary degrees by the university of uppsala 1996 and the university of giessen 19. He has served as chairman of the executive committee of the international association of university professors of english. Ihab hassan 146 s bibliography is long, including some fifteen books and 300 odd articles and reviews. In more recent years, some of hassan 146 s work has moved toward autobiography, some toward travel writing: out of egypt: fragments of an autobiography appeared in 1986, selves at risk: patterns of quest in contemporary american letters in 1990, and between the eagle and the sun: traces of japan in 1996.

His rumors of change: essays of five decades collects portions of earlier works. Hassan continues actively publishing in academic journals, and some of these articles will be alluded to in the interview that follows. The last lustrum has witnessed his publication of in quest of nothing: selected essays, 1998 2008 2010. Contributions to a pmla 147 forum on intellectuals 148 and the 147 millennial issue, 148 and 147 globalism and its discontents 148 in profession 19.

Several of his essays have been included in best australian essays for 20, 2001, 2002, and have been nominated for the pushcart prize. In more recent years, hassan has turned to fiction writing, publishing short stories in many literary journals, and completing a novel, the changeling.

used with permission from style 33, 1 fall 19

full text of frank cioffi 146 s interview of ihab hassan. what was postmodernism, and what is it still? i believe it is a revenant, the return of the irrepressible every time we are rid of it, its ghost rises back. Certainly, i know less about postmodernism today than i did thirty years ago, when i began to write about it. This may be because postmodernism has changed, i have changed, the world has changed. 160 160 160 160 but this is only to confirm nietzsche 146 s insight, that if an idea has a history, it is already an interpretation, subject to future revision. What escapes interpretation and reinterpretation is a platonic idea or an abstract analytical concept, like a circle or a triangle. Romanticism, modernism, postmodernism, however, like humanism or realism, will shift and slide continually with time, particularly in an age of ideological conflict and media hype.

160 160 160 160 all this has not prevented postmodernism from haunting the discourse of architecture, the arts, the humanities, the social and sometimes even the physical sciences haunting not only academic but also public speech in business, politics, the media, and entertainment industries haunting the language of private life styles like postmodern cuisine just add a dash of raspberry vinegar. 160 160 160 160 the term, let alone the concept, may thus belong to what philosophers call an essentially contested category. That is, in plainer language, if you put in a room the main discussants of the concept say leslie fiedler, charles jencks, jean franзois lyotard, bernard smith, rosalind krauss, fredric jameson, marjorie perloff, linda hutcheon, and, just to add to the confusion, myself locked the room and threw away the key, no consensus would emerge between the discussants after a week, but a thin trickle of blood might appear beneath the sill. 160 160 160 160 let us not despair: though we may be unable to define or exorcise the ghost of postmodernism, we can approach it, surprising it from various angles, perhaps teasing it into a partial light. in a recent encyclical, titled 147 fides et ratio , 148 pope john paul ii actually used the word postmodernism to condemn extreme relativism in values and beliefs, acute irony and skepticism toward reason, and the denial of any possibility of truth, human or divine. In cultural studies, a highly politicized field, the term postmodernism is often used in opposition to postcolonialism, the former deemed historically feckless, being unpolitical or, worse, not politically correct.

In pop culture, postmodernism or pomo as yuppies call it insouciantly refers to a wide range of phenomena, from andy warhol to madonna, from the colossal plaster mona lisa i saw advertising a pachinko parlor in tokyo to the giant, cardboard figure of michelangelo 146 s david pink dayglo classes, canary shorts, a camera slung across bare, brawny shoulders advertising kontiki travels in new zealand. 160 160 160 160 what do all these have in common? well, fragments, hybridity, relativism, play, parody, pastiche, an ironic, anti ideological stance, an ethos bordering on kitsch and camp. So, we have begun to build a family of words applying to postmodernism we have begun to create a context, if not a definition, for it. More impatient or ambitious readers can consult hans bertens 146 the idea of the postmodern. 160 160 160 160 but now i must make my second move or feint to approach postmodernism from a different perspective.

160 160 160 160 i do so by making a distinction i did not sufficiently stress in my earlier work: between postmodernism and postmodernity. This is the distinction that constitutes the main thrust of this statement, and to which i will later return. 160 160 160 160 for the moment, let me simply say that i mean postmodernism to refer to the cultural sphere, especially literature, philosophy, and the various arts, including architecture, while postmodernity refers to the geopolitical scheme, less order than disorder, which has emerged in the last decades. The latter, sometimes called postcolonialism, features globalization and localization, conjoined in erratic, often lethal, ways. 160 160 160 160 this distinction is not the defunct marxist difference between superstructure and base, since the new economic, political, religious, and technological forces of the world hardly conform to marxist 147 laws. 148 nor does postmodernity equal postcolonialism, though the latter, with its concern for colonial legacies, may be part of the former. 160 160 160 160 think of postmodernity as a world process, by no means identical everywhere yet global nonetheless.

Or think of it as a vast umbrella under which stand various phenomena: postmodernism in the arts, poststructuralism in philosophy, feminism in social discourse, postcolonial and cultural studies in academe, but also multi national capitalism, cybertechnologies, international terrorism, assorted separatist, ethnic, nationalist, and religious movements all standing under, but not causally subsumed by, postmodernity. 160 160 160 160 i have said that i did not stress enough the distinction between postmodernism and postmodernity in my earlier work. But in fairness to the subject and perhaps to myself i should note that an internal distinction i made within postmodernism itself points to a crucial characteristic of postmodernity in its planetary context. 160 160 160 160 in an essay titled 147 culture, indeterminacy, and immanence: margins of the postmodern age 148 1977 , i coined the term 147 indetermanence 148 that is, indeterminacy combined with immanence to describe two disparate tendencies within postmodernism: that of cultural indeterminacy, on the one hand, and that of technological immanence, on the other. These tendencies are contrastive rather than dialectical: they ensue in no hegelian or marxist synthesis. 160 160 160 160 by indeterminacy, or better still, indeterminacies, i mean a combination of trends that include openness, fragmentation, ambiguity, discontinuity, decenterment, heterodoxy, pluralism, deformation, all conducive to indeterminacy or under determination. The latter concept alone, deformation, subsumes a dozen current terms like deconstruction, decreation, disintegration, displacement, difference, discontinuity, disjunction, disappearance, de definition, demystification, detotalization, delegitimation, decolonization.

Through all these concepts moves a vast will to undoing, affecting the body politic, the body cognitive, the erotic body, the individual psyche, the entire realm of discourse in the west. In literature alone, our ideas of author, audience, reading, writing, book, genre, critical theory, and of literature itself, have all suddenly become questionable questionable but far from invalid, reconstituting themselves in various ways. 160 160 160 160 these uncertainties or indeterminacies, however, are also dispersed or disseminated by the fluent imperium of technology. A term that i employ without religious echo to designate the capacity of mind to generalize itself in symbols, intervene more and more into nature, act through its own abstractions, and project human consciousness to the edges of the cosmos. This mental tendency may be further described by words like diffusion, dissemination, projection, interplay, communication, which all derive from the emergence of human beings as language animals, homo pictor or homo significans. Creatures constituting themselves, and also their universe, by symbols of their own making. Meanwhile, the public world dissolves as fact and fiction blend, history becomes a media happening, science takes its own models as the only accessible reality, cybernetics confronts us with the enigma of artificial intelligence deep blue contra kasparov , and technologies project our perceptions to the edge of matter, within the atom or at the rim of the expanding universe.

160 160 160 160 no doubt, these tendencies, i repeat, may seem less prevalent in some countries than others like america or australia, germany or japan, where the term postmodernism has become familiar both in and outside the university. But the fact in most developed societies remains: as a cultural phenomenon, postmodernism evinces the double tendency i have dubbed 147 indetermanence 148 its forms cognate to labyrinths, networks, the rhizomes of deleuze and guattari. 160 160 160 160 the earth, however, is larger and more significant than planet hollywood, deutsche bank, or mitsubishi.