What is postmodernism?
Postmodernism can be seen as reimagining and copying things off others. In regards to art its the modern version of the earlier version but still copied from previous work.
- Pastiche – the work of art, drama, literature, music or architecture that imitates the work of the artist.
- Parody – is work or a performance that imitates another work or performance with ridicule or irony.
- Bricolage – ‘involves the rearrangement and juxtaposition of previously unconnected signs to produce new codes of meaning’
- Intertextuality
- Referential
- Surface and style over substance and content
- Metanarrative
- Hyperreality – nothings really real or new as we always copy off something from earlier years.
- Simulation (sometimes termed by Baudrillard as ‘Simulacrum’) – imitation of a situation or process an image or representation of someone or something.
- Consumerist Society – a society in which people often buy new goods, especially goods that they do not need, and in which a high value is placed on owning many things
- Fragmentary Identities –
- Alienation
- Implosion
- cultural appropriation
- Reflexivity
Richard Hoggart (Uses of Literacy) noted the shift in modern societies particularly the impact on our ‘neighbourhood lives’, which was ‘an extremely local life, in which everything is remarkably near’
created a high polarized class division between the rich / the really super rich and the poor / underclass (ie the really, really poor) made possible through the rapid increase of new forms of technological developments.
consumption by its very nature bolsters a self-centred individualism which is the basis for stable and secure identities. Strinati (238)
Putting it very simply, the transition from substance to style is linked to a transition from production to consumption. STRINATI (235)
‘In a postmodern world, surfaces and style become the most important defining features of the mass media and popular culture’ Strinati (234).
STYLE OVER SUBSTANCE. could be applied to both ghost town and letter to the free.
The loss of a metanarrative – ‘overarching story’ those overarching ideas, attitudes, values and beliefs that have held us together in a shared belief, For example, the belief in religion, science, capitalism, communism, revolution, war, peace and so on