Rumors of Change: Essays of Five Decades

Seeks to recover the major trends, themes, and debates that have animated the American literary and cultural scene for nearly half a century

Ihab Hassan, sometimes called the "father of Postmodernism," sets out to recover the major trends, themes, and debates that have animated the American literary and cultural scene for nearly half a century. They represent Hassan's various topics, styles, critical methods, and social attitudes. From formalism in the forties to multiculturalism in the nineties, from existential engagements to postmodern dubieties, from Paul Bowles, Jean Stafford, and William Burroughs to Peter Matthiessen, Marge Piercey, and Christina Dodwell, the essays move with the momentum of history. But they move critically. In sympathy with their subjects, they challenge nonetheless the cant and pieties of their moment. Rumors of Change is captive to no school or ideology. It wants to engage a general and literate public. With a personal--even intimate--aspect, this book serves as a capsule cultural history of the postwar period, witnessing shifts of literary taste and social concern.

Organized in five parts, the work focuses successively on novelists of the fifties; such broad themes as the antihero or city in literature, issues of an emergent Postmodernism, the abrasive debates of theory and ideology, travel and geopolitics in our clime. Held in a common frame, the essays work through various ideologies and reach beyond them, opening on the future. They find their hope in a vital and pragmatic humanism, a public, not technical, criticism, an independent stance.
More personally, the book attests to the achievement of a vanguard critic who pioneered the study of Postmodernism. Written with clarity and grace, the work recovers the essay as a pliant, zestful genre, giving in individual accents credible proofs of mind. Thus, Rumors of Change serves not only as a compact précis of postwar American culture but also as an intellectual autobiography, centered on shared experiences of the times, the universal.