Postmodernism Flashcards

Vocabulary flashcards based on lecture notes about Postmodernism.

Postmodernism

A term encompassing developments in philosophy, film, architecture, art, literature, and culture, reacting to modernism's lack of organizing principle.

Postmodern Literature

Literature after WW2 that lacks a clear definition because of disagreement on concepts, characteristics and ideas.

Blurring of High and Popular Culture

The mixing of high culture and popular culture (or mass culture).

Grand Narratives

Religion, science, etc, that are challenged by Postmodernism.

Lyotard's Postmodernist Theory

Favors ‘micronarratives’ that can go in any direction, that reflect diversity and that are unpredictable.

Simulation

The process in which representations of things come to replace the things being represented.

Hyperreality

A condition in which 'reality' has been replaced by simulacra.

Simulacrum

Is a 'copy without an original'.

Bricolage

French critic Jean Baudrillard refers to it as a process which is sometimes translated as "tinkering" (or DIY).

Historiography

The study of the writing of history, the way style, narrative, metaphors, and so on affect how the historical record is received and understood.

Metafiction

Fiction about fiction; or more especially a kind of fiction that openly comments on its own fictional status.

Idea of the Individual

Key to modernism and notions of writing, genius, and style.

Pastiche and Parody

The imitation or mimicry of other styles and particularly of the mannerisms and stylistic twitches of other styles.

Pastiche

Is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language: but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without parody’s ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which what is being imitated is rather comic.

Claude Levi-Strauss

Developed the concept of bricolage saw any text as constructed out of socially recognisable ‘debris’ from other texts.

Gerard Genette

Developed the term transtextuality and developed four sub-groups.

Metafiction

Writing about writing, often used to undermine the authority of the author and to advance stories in unique ways.