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Rumors of Change: Essays of Five Decades, by Ihab Hassan; xix & 261 pp. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995; $49.95 cloth, 24.95 paper.
When I received Hassan's collection, I was fully prepared to dislike it. I remembered well how Hassan's hip pronouncements of postmodern crisis had often set my teeth on edge, and I had trouble suppressing my suspicion that proclamations of the twilight of modernism were de rigueur for the dawn of a postmodern career. I also suspected what might be lurking behind the unnecessarily opaque diction and the easy desire to enrich a discourse already leaning too heavily on glib formulae. I said to myself, "Hassan's had a good run. Why publish material already accessible on every good library's shelves?" Also, I wondered how this collection of Hassan's "greatest hits" would play to that raw crowd of postmodernists with whom Hassan's career is so identified, especially given this crowd's scorn for the long view and its easy celebration of the dislocated and fragmentary.
But I have not disliked Rumors of Change. Although Hassan includes essays concerning writers no longer germane to our appreciation of postwar thinking, and although this volume is somewhat clumsily organized, it dramatizes the progress of what Hassan calls a "journey . . . without exile, beyond exile" (p. 253). Importantly, even old-fashionedly, he rejects the roles of victim and outcast, an important delineation for someone technically a postcolonialist. The book, then, shows the course of a journey that has sufficient surprise and challenge to spark our curiosity about the arc of a postwar academic career.
Two metaphors direct our understanding of this volume. The first, drawn from Zbigniew Herbert, asks us to see a career as something both brave and transforming, "a true journey from which you do not return" (p. 253). Secondly, Hassan has always been more than a mere interpreter of literature...