Postmodernism has become a paradoxically dated term. Because it had its greatest currency during an interlude when modernism was presumed defunct, the "postmodern" was a concept invested in getting over, going beyond, superseding a "modernism" unfit for further scrutiny. In the past decade, a boom in scholarship has revealed unsuspected dimensions of modernism. Postmodernism, meanwhile, seems to have foundered at the dead letter office. "What was postmodernism, and what is it still?" wonders Ihab Hassan, one of its earlier theorists, who characterizes it as "a revenant, the return of the irrepressible; every time we are rid of it, its ghost rises back" (1). Although he concedes it's an Oedipal concept, ineffectual without modernism breathing down its neck, Hassan clearly favors retaining it for conceptual application while more or less conceding its collapse as a periodizing referent (8). But even if we admit the futility of attempts to fabricate a reliable mirror of this or any other age, there's still something to be learned from the urge to narrate beginnings and ends, to distinguish one sort of time from another.