- Pastiche – a work of art, drama, literature, music, or architecture that imitates the work of a previous artist
- Parody – a work or performance that imitates another work or performance with ridicule or irony
- Bricolage – a useful term to apply to postmodernist texts as it ‘involves the rearrangement and juxtaposition of previously unconnected signs to produce new codes of meaning’
- Intertextuality – surface signs, gestures and play
- Metanarrative – A metanarrative (also meta-narrative and grand narrative; French: métarécit) in critical theory and particularly in postmodernism is a narrative about narratives of historical meaning, experience, or knowledge, which offers a society legitimation through the anticipated completion of a (as yet unrealized) master idea.
- Hyper reality – Hyperreality, in semiotics and postmodernism, is an inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced postmodern societies.
- Simulacrum – Not just a representation of the real, but the real itself, a grand narrative that is ‘truth‘ in its own right: an understanding of uncertain/certainty that Baudrillard terms the hyperreal.
- Conumerist Society – is one in which people devote a great deal of time, energy, resources and thought to “consuming”. The general view of life in a consumerist society is consumption is good, and more consumption is even better. The United States is an example of a hyper-consumerist society.
- Fragmentary Identities – As an example, mobile telephony (both hardware and software) now appears to proliferate and connect every aspect of our lives, and generally does so from the perspective of consumption – consuming images, sounds, stories, messages etc – rather than production. Alienated individuals living (precariously) in fragmented societies.
- Implosion – an instance of something collapsing violently inwards.
- cultural appropriation – the unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the customs, practices, ideas, etc. of one people or society by members of another and typically more dominant people or society.
- Reflexivity – generally refers to the examination of one’s own beliefs, judgments and practices during the research process and how these may have influenced the research. If positionality refers to what we know and believe then reflexivity is about what we do with this knowledge.
Postmodernism is a way of seeing the world. New expressions of of identity and being – often found in popular culture and modern technology, are all new iterations (versions) of previous expressions of popular culture.
Shuker refers to Fredric Jameson about that ’embody the postmodern condition.
Hard to distinguish reality from fiction
Style over substance. Put another way, are we more interested in the surface of an object than its’ inner meaning?
Richard Hoggart (uses of literacy) – Lost our neighborhood lives, we are more concerned and centered around consumption
Fragmentary consumption = Fragmentary identities. As an example, mobile telephony (both hardware and software) now appears to proliferate and connect every aspect of our lives, and generally does so from the perspective of consumption – consuming images, sounds, stories, messages etc – rather than production. Alienated individuals living (precariously) in fragmented societies.
Loss of metanarrative
Jean Baudrillard would describe as Implosion which gives rise to what he terms Simulacra.