The Dismemberment of Orpheus  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Revision as of 12:27, 20 February 2011; view current revision
←Older revision | Newer revision→
Jump to: navigation, search

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

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




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "The Dismemberment of Orpheus" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools