Rosenberg/Barthes/Hassan: The Postmodern Habit of Thought - Paperback

by Jerome Klinkowitz (Author)

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.

Author Biography

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."