When the curtain rises, Hassan has already begun to list names. Jaques Derrida, Merce Cunningham, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Robert Wilson.....Some of the names should be categorized by field (history, political philosophy, psychoanalysis) and some should be categorized by place (and in America...). Any list of names will do, so long as Foreman's name is notably absent. He lists for one...three...five minutes, then continues into the dialogue without a distinctive change in tone.

Hassan: Let us admit it: there is a will to power in nomenclature, as well as in people or texts....

Foreman: I feel connected.

Hassan: These are far too heterogenous to form a movement, paradigm, or school. Still, they may evoke a number of related cultural tendencies, a constellation of values, a repertoire of procedures and attitudes.

Foreman: A very beautiful watch.

Hassan: Is postmodernism an honorific term, used insidiously to valorize writers, however disparate, whom we otherwise esteem, to hail trends, however discordant, which we somehow approve? Or is it, on the contrary, a term of opprobrium and objurgation? In short, is postmoderism a descriptive as well as evaluative or normative category of literary thought? Or does it belong, as Charles Altieri notes, to that category of "essentially contested concepts" in philosophy that never wholly exhaust their constitutive confusions?

Foreman: (As the tone softens) What does your internal time say now, Professor?

Hassan: The Apollonian view, rangy and abstract, discerns only historical conjunctions; the Dionysian feeling, sensuous though nearly purblind, touches only the disjunctive moment.

Foreman: The question is, what can he do with one hand tied behind his back?

Hassan: Thus postmodernism, by invoking two divinities at once, touches only the disjunctive moment.

Hassan slowly looks toward Foreman, who covers his private parts with his hands. All but he slowly fall to the floor as the childlike piano tune returns.

Hassan: Sameness and difference, unity and rupture, filiation and revolt, all must be honored if we are to attend to history, apprehend (percieve, understand) change both as a spatial, mental structure and as a temporal, physical process, both as pattern and unique event.

Foreman: Turn the page. (Ecstatically hugging the book to his chest.) I'd like to linger a bit longer over this very particular page. Turn the page. (As he does so.) What does it say on this page, Professor? Remember? Did you ever see this in real life?

Hassan: The reception or denial of postmodernism thus remains contingent on the psychopolitics of academic life-- including the varoius dispositions of people and power in our universities, of critical factions and personal frictions, of boundaries that arbitrarily include or exclude...

Foreman: Wait a minute-- (He crosses to Hassan, momentarily distracted by a big pink disk that rolls in behind him.)

The lights go down as Foreman enjoys an ample sense of time, which Hassan has always believed poets and prophets have, but few literary scholars seem to afford.