Autobiographical Account as Manifest Ethnic Expression: A Civilizationist Viewpoint about a Selected Fassage from Ihab Hassan's Out of Egypt

  Most studies on ethnicity and ethnic attitudes involve subgroups and minori. ties, seldom individuals, and still rarer an individual case. This paper deals with the manifest ethnicity in an exilic narrative by Ihab Hassan, an American of Arab background who, at twenty-one of age, left his native Egypt for ever to settle in the United States of America, deliberately cutting almost all vital and cultural ties with ethnic ancestry. After four decades of exile culminating in an obvi- ous Americanization, Hassan publishes an autobiography wherein he confides childhood, boyhood, and adulthood memories. What were the circumstances