The Dismemberment of Orpheus
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature is a 1971 work of literary theory by Arab-American theorist Ihab Hassan. It was one of the first works to use the term postmodernism in its present form (though it had been used by many others before him, Charles Olson for example, to refer to other literary trends) in his book. Hassan traces the development of what he called "literature of silence" through Marquis de Sade, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, Beckett, and many others, including developments such as the Theatre of the Absurd and the nouveau roman.
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 |
See also