ABSTRACT
Ihab Hassan no longer plays a significant role in the debate on postmodernism. Hassan’s contributions, however, were vital in keeping the debate alive in the early 1970s, when it was mostly William Spanos and his boundary 2 group and Hassan who actively promoted the terms postmodern and postmodernism. It is obvious now that it was Hassan’s, rather than Spanos’s, use of the term that gave it wider circulation, as has been duly acknowledged by Lyotard, Jencks, and others. Moreover, Hassan’s formative influence on especially the literary-critical debate has been immense: there is virtually no article or book on literary postmodernism published between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s that does not refer to Hassan’s work.
