In 1971 the critic Ihab Hassan publishes The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature, the first book to give postmodernism a literary genealogy and a canon. Hassan, an Egyptian-born American scholar, becomes the term's tireless taxonomist, and his tables of modernist and postmodernist traits are quoted for decades.
Tagged: Postmodernism
The Event
- Date
- 1971 (exact)
- Era
- The Structuralist Break; Standard periodization of postmodern history
- Location
- Madison; today Madison, Wisconsin
- Traditions
- Postmodernism
- Streams
- Postmodernism
- Key figures
- Ihab Hassan
- Key texts
- The Dismemberment of Orpheus
Primary Sources
- Hassan, Ihab. The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.
Secondary Sources
- Bertens, Hans. The Idea of the Postmodern: A History. London: Routledge, 1995.
- Hassan, Ihab. The Postmodern Turn. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987.
- Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1988.
Provenance: HIST-1438; confidence 0.95; accessed 2026-10-30.
Related on This Site
History Event
Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus
1972
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Derrida's Of Grammatology
1967
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Derrida's Structure, Sign and Play lecture
1966
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Foucault's Discipline and Punish
1975
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Foucault's The Order of Things
1966
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Jencks's The Language of Post-Modern Architecture
1977
History Event
Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition
1979
World View
Postmodernism
Postmodernism doubts every grand story that claims to explain everything; it treats truth as shaped by language, culture, and power rather than simply discovered.