From Humanism to Postmodernism: An Autobiographical Approach (2001)

Abdel Wahab Elmessiri's article "From Humanism to Postmodernism: An Autobiographical Approach" was originally presented as a keynote speech delivered at the Sixth International Symposium on Comparative Literature: Modernism and Postmodernism (2000); and then published in the Symposium Proceedings, eds. Hoda Gindi and Galila-Ann Ragheb, Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts, Cairo University (2001). In her foreword to the article, Amal Mazhar considers Abdel Wahab Elmessiri (1938-2008), a distinguished Egyptian scholar, specialized in English literature, who could be rightly called ‘the organic intellectual’ and whose interest went far beyond his specialization, by becoming a social and political activist. Narrating a purely personal journey as a young Egyptian scholar’, he left his hometown Damanhour in the Egyptian Delta to study at Alexandria University, Columbia University, then Rutgers University, USA. Elmessiri embarks on a similar journey by surveying major critical and literary trends post New Criticism to the year 2000.Foreword by Amal Mazhar.