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The Dismemberment of Orpheus. Toward a Postmodern Literature
277
Citations
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References
1972
Year
Literary TheoryContemporary CultureArt TheoryExistentialismComparative LiteratureLiterary CriticismArt CriticismModern OrpheusRadical AestheticLanguage StudiesIhab HassanIntellectual HistoryLiterary StudyPost-colonial CriticismFrancophone LiteraturePoeticsLiterary HistoryHumanitiesContemporary FictionPostmodern LiteratureArtsOxford University PressModernity
The book frames Orphic dismemberment and regeneration as a metaphor for a radical crisis in art, language, culture, and consciousness that prefigures postmodern literature. Hassan combines literary history, brief biography, and critical analysis, situating modern authors alongside avant‑garde writers and contemporary developments in art, music, and philosophy to foreshadow postmodernism. The study traces a hypothetical line from Sade through Hemingway, Kafka, Genet, and Beckett to future literature, noting a split into interludes on Pataphysics, Dada, Surrealism, existentialism, and aliterature, and adds a new preface and postface on postmodernism.
In this book, the first edition of which was published in 1971 by Oxford University Press, Ihab Hassan takes Orphic dismemberment and regeneration as his metaphor for a radical crisis in art and language, culture and consciousness, which prefigures postmodern literature. The modern Orpheus, he writes, sings on a lyre without strings. Thus, his sensitive critique traces a hypothetical line from Sade through four modern authors Hemingway, Kafka, Genet, and Beckett to a literature still to come. But the line also breaks into two Interludes, one concerning Pataphysics, Dada, and Surrealism, and the other concerning Existentialism and Aliterature. Combining literary history, brief biography, and critical analysis, Hassan surrounds these authors with a complement of avant-garde writers whose works also foreshadow the postmodern temper. These include Jarry, Apollinaire, Tzara, Breton, Sartre, Camus, Nathalie Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet, and in America, Cage, Salinger, Ginsberg, Barth, and Burroughs. Hassan takes account also of related contemporary developments in art, music, and philosophy, and of many works of literary theory and criticism. For this new edition, Hassan has added a new preface and postface on the developing character of postmodernism, a concept which has gained currency since the first edition of this work, and which he himself has done much to theorize.