Self reflexivity: this involves the seemingly paradoxical combination of self-consciousness and some sort of historical grounding
Irony: Post modernism uses irony as a primary mode of expression, but it also abuses, installs, and subverts conventions and usually negotiates contradictions through irony
Boundaries: Post modernism challenges the boundaries between genres, art forms, theory and art, high art and the mass media
Constructs: Post modernism is actively involved in examining the constructs society creates including, but not exclusively, the following:
- Nation: Post modernism examines the construction of nations/nationality and questions such constructions
- Gender: Post modernism reassesses gender, the construction of gender, and the role of gender in cultural formations
- Race: Post modernism questions and reassesses constructs of race
- Sexuality: Post modernism questions and reassesses constructs of sexuality
Further definitions
- "Postmodernism is cultural movement that came after modernism, also it follows our shift from being a industrial society to that of an information society, through globalization of capital. Markers of the postmodern culture include opposing hierarchy, diversifying and recycling culture, questioning scientific reasoning, and embracing paradox. Postmodernism is a term applied to a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, and culture, which are generally characterized as either emerging from, in reaction to, or superseding modernism"
- "Postmodern style is often characterized by eclecticism, digression, collage, pastiche, and irony. Postmodern theorists see postmodern art as a conflation or reversal of well-established modernist systems, such as the roles of artist versus audience, seriousness versus play, or high culture versus kitsch."
By R. Lee from Media Studies 180 Hunter College, Sections 102, 103
(intertextual references are often found in postmodern texts.)
- Postmodern texts deliberately play with meaning. They are designed to be read by a literate (experienced in other texts) audience and will exhibit many traits of intertexuality. Many texts openly acknowledge that, given the diversity in today's audiences, they can have no preferred reading (Reception Theory) and present a whole range of oppositional readings simultaneously. Many of the sophisticated visual puns used by advertising can be described as postmodern. Postmodern texts will employ a range of referential techniques such as bricolage, and will use images and ideas in a way that is entirely alien to their original function (e.g. using footage of Nazi war crimes in a pop video).
- Intertextuality: The whole network of relations, conventions and expectations by which the text is defined; the relationship between texts.
- Reception Theory: A version of reader response literary theory that emphasizes the reader's reception of a literary text.
- Bricolage: A piece created from diverse resources.
- "A general explanation is that postmodernism is a contradiction in terms, as post means after and modern means now, it is impossible for anything to be after now. The term itself is supposed to be deliberately unexplainable."
- In terms of literature and media it is generally considered to be anything which makes little attempt to hide the fact that it is not real, it wants you to know that its been created and it wants you to recognise elements from elsewhere (i.e. that they have 'stolen' ideas from other sources), that there are no new or original ideas and that everything is in someway connected. Importantly it doesn’t want you to view it as being any more or less valid or important than a text which pretends to be real, postmodernists want everything to be equal, they want to remove binary opposites and start again. Students are often criticised for being post modern as they tend to like 'naff' things and think they are cool precisely because they aren't cool (thus removing binary opposites)".
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