Postmodernism, Etc.: An Interview with Ihab Hassan - Interview

Style, Fall, 1999 by Frank L. Cioffi

Myself, I find Marxism, viscerally as well as intellectually, distasteful--on ethical, aesthetic, political, psychological, and simple pragmatic grounds. I have always found it so--perhaps it's the loner in me again--as I have always found all forms of fascism, totalitarianism, authoritarianism, and fundamentalism repugnant. Increasingly, too, I have come to distrust abstractions, especially bloodied abstractions (to misquote Wallace Stevens); that is, abstractions that demand human blood to maintain them for a higher end. No!

A limber Left, however, fully cognizant of the ethical, aesthetic, and spiritual needs of human beings, can indeed revitalize not only the academy but also society. But in what sense would it be "Left"? In the sense of progressive? If so, it will require a constant adjustment in direction, since no party has a monopoly on progress, as history has amply shown.

What would you recommend to a student who wants to go into the humanities? Do you feel that the university system is something that has a lot to offer people seeking careers?

IH: I ask prospective doctoral candidates to test the limits of their commitment to the academic profession. Beyond that, I cannot go. If they do enter the profession with strong commitments, they will do more to shape it than I can.

What worries me, though, is the tendency--especially in America, from Charlie Wilson to Bill Gates--to treat all human institutions as simply variants on the business model. A hospital, a church, an army, a family, a research lab, and, yes, a university--all these are not simply businesses, though all may respond to the invisible hand."

Do you feel that teaching has an ethical urgency? You have written that teaching has engendered and informed your work.

IH: Teaching is, has always been, unavoidably ethical, all the way back to Socrates. But it is also aesthetic, political, erotic, spiritual.[ldots] As a central human activity, it calls upon our full capacity, students and teachers alike, to be fully human. Partial teaching, in both senses of "partial," shrinks everyone concerned. But good teaching must be a little perverse.

In what sense "perverse"?

IH: I mean unexpected, unpremeditated, uninstitutionalized. To be by one's students and by oneself surprised. To have a touch of "Dadacticism," as I once called it.

Do you think that we should teach a "great books" type of curriculum? Do you feel that feminist objections to the canon are valid ones?

IH: Yes, indeed, we should, we do, we will teach great books (no quotation marks there necessary). Yes, the objections of many feminists to the canon have been sometimes valid. No, the canon, a responsive canon--and Frank Kermode has shown it to be ever so--should not be abolished, cannot be abolished, since the "abolitionists" most often cry for the institution of their canon, whether they call it that or not.

Do you feel that we are outmoded because we teach relatively underread books? Or do you feel that their perdurance over time signals some importance? You don't usually teach "popular culture"--or write about it very much; most of your work is in what might be termed "high culture." Do you have a particular preference for "high culture"? Can we draw a firm line between fine and popular art, as Norman Mailer and John Updike recently did in reviews of Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full?