Rosenberg/Barthes/Hassan: The Postmodern Habit of Thought

by Jerome Klinkowitz

Overview

Jerome Klinkowitz presents an opening attempt to define postmodernism as it applies to the arts and culture. Rosenberg/Barthes/Hassan discusses the work of three critics who came to prominence in the 1960s, an era of social, ideological, and aesthetic turmoil. Sharing a disdain for modernism's authoritarianism, elitism, and sterile preoccupation with despair, the three critics called for a postmodern art that would emphasize action, reality, and immanence and offer fresh envisionings of the world.

Klinkowitz traces the progression of thought that links the work of critic Harold Rosenberg, who introduced the concept of "action painting"; the semiotician Roland Barthes, who redefined art, culture, and ideology as language systems; and visionary literary scholar Ihab Hassan, whose works call for nothing less than a rethinking of man's place within the material and spiritual universe.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820340166
Publisher:	University of Georgia Press
Publication date:	06/15/2012
Pages:	148
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.34(d)

About the Author

JEROME KLINKOWITZ is University Distinguished Scholar and Professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa. He is the author or editor of many books on postwar culture and literature, among them Structuring the Void: The Struggle for Subject in Contemporary American Fiction, Slaughterhouse-Five: Reforming the Novel and the World, and The Practice of Fiction in America: Writers from Hawthorne to the Present.

JEROME KLINKOWITZ is University Distinguished Scholar and Professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa. He is the author or editor of many books on postwar culture and literature, among them Structuring the Void: The Struggle for Subject in Contemporary American Fiction, Slaughterhouse-Five: Reforming the Novel and the World, and The Practice of Fiction in America: Writers from Hawthorne to the Present.

Table of Contents

1 Rosenberg/Barthes/Hassan 1

2 Harold Rosenberg: Art as Act 13

3 Roland Barthes: To Write 43

4 Ihab Hassan: Re-visioning Man 93

5 The Postmodern Habit of Thought 121

Bibliography 131

Index 135

Editorial Reviews

This work itself is a postmodern critical collage that should invite its readers to enter into polyphony that aims at liberating us from those fixed categories of thought that often, in effect, stop thought.

French Review

This is nothing less than a most provocative schematization of the ontological substructures of postmodernism as articulated by the three writers mentioned in the book's title, plus Klinkowitz's astute appreciation of the significant artistic events of the last twenty years.

Artweek

"This work itself is a postmodern critical collage that should invite its readers to enter into polyphony that aims at liberating us from those fixed categories of thought that often, in effect, stop thought." —French Review

"This is nothing less than a most provocative schematization of the ontological substructures of postmodernism as articulated by the three writers mentioned in the book's title, plus Klinkowitz's astute appreciation of the significant artistic events of the last twenty years." —Artweek

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