Postmodern style - Notes

Postmodern text can be identified by its eclecticism
Erosion of asethetic and stylistic boundaries
- mixing of different styles, genre, and artistic conventions
They are designed to be read by a literal audience.
- exhibiting many traits of intertextuality
Postmodern texts will employ a range of referential techniques
-bricolage

Featherstone describes postmodernism as "stylistic promiscuity"
- the breakdown of distinction between high and low culture = democratic? All class hierarchies have dissappeared

Low culture is a derogatory term for popular culture; everything in society that has mass appeal
High culture is a term referring to the "best of breed" cultural products.

Postmodernism = breaking of boundaries
- between public spheres and private sphere
- between reality and fiction
- between past, present and future
- between art and everyday life

Modernism - production and consumption
Postmodernism - reproduction and re-consumption
- text has become mere repetition and imitation

Critisms
- appropriation, re-appropriation and borrowing = declining emphasis on originality
- the death of the AUTHOR
- Dick Hebdige - the author = no longer required to invent by simply "rework" or rearrange.

Key theorist = Fredric Jameson
Key ideas:
- depthlessness
- nostalgia/eroison of history
- paradoy
- pastiche

Depthlessness
- postmodern culture is driven by a consumer culture that celebrates the surface
- he states the postmodern condition is "a new kind of flatness, of depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense".
Nostalgia
- in the postmodern era our historical past is represented "not through its content but through glossy stylistic means, conveying 'pastness' by the glossy qualities of the image"
- postmodern text "imitate old, dead styles" through pastiche
- describes a longing for the past, often in romanticised and idealised form

Intertextuality - one media text referring to another
- intertextuality - pastiche, parody, homage
                            - pastiche and homage are interchangeable
Parody
Purpose:
- ridicule
- satirize
- polemical

Pastiche - "blank parody, parody that has lost its sense of humour"
- less about comedy
Jameson condemns the world of pastiche as "a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible"

Hybridity - the mixture of several different genre categories into one text

Playfulness
Irony - when a piece of art or literature is self-consciously doing the opposite of what it appears to be doing
The idea that postmodern text takes ideas/styles/designs and play around with them

Reflexivity and self-consciousness
Postmodern text is self-reflexive demonstrating an awareness of itself as a text

Fragmented, disjointed and dystopian narrative
- postmodern text demonstrates the confusion of time and space by the subverting classical cinematic conventions namely a linear narrative structure.
Disjointed narrative involve fragmentation and discontinuity where the story lines and characterisation are broken up, disturbed and don't follow the usual/conventional pattern
Dystopian narrative means narratives become more negative.

- this can result in uncertainty and the shaking up of previously understood beliefs and roles.
- postmodern text can make audiences feel that there are no generic rules any more
- challenges many aspects of life or belief systems which were once take for granted

Voyeurism
- texts that are obsessed by the process of looking at others.