Ihab Habib Hassan (1925–2015) was an Egypt-born American literary theorist and writer. He was a scholar of the development of modernist and postmodernist literature.
Born in Cairo, Egypt, Hassan studied electrical engineering at the University of Cairo and immigrated to the United States in 1946. He earned a master’s in electrical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. He switched to literature, earning an M.A. and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1953. Hassan taught English and comparative literature at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 1953–54, Wesleyan University 1954–70, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee 1970–1999.
Hassan was an authority on postmodernism—an evolution from modernist writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway to literature characterized by different narrative techniques used by Thomas Pynchon and Toni Morrison.
Hassan wrote 15 books and more than 300 articles on literary criticism, history, and culture. His writings include Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel (1961,) The Literature of Silence (1967; about Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett,) Selves at Risk: Patterns of Quest in Contemporary American Letters (1990,) and Rumors of Change: Essays of Five Decades (1995.)
Hassan’s memoirs are Out of Egypt: Scenes and Arguments of an Autobiography (1985) and Between the Eagle and the Sun: Traces of Japan (1996.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Ihab Hassan
Quotations offer one kind of break in what the eye can see, the ear can hear.
—Ihab Hassan
Topics: Quotations
We rarely quote nowadays to appeal to authority… though we quote sometimes to display our sapience and erudition. Some authors we quote against. Some we quote not at all, offering them our scrupulous avoidance, and so make them part of our “white mythology.” Other authors we constantly invoke, chanting their names in cerebral rituals of propitiation or ancestor worship.
—Ihab Hassan
Topics: Quotations
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