This document discusses key concepts in postmodernism and how they are reflected in popular culture. It explains that postmodernism emerged as a reaction to disillusionment with modernism's ideals. It emphasizes how postmodern media uses intertextuality by incorporating elements from other works, and how this allows audiences to interpret new media based on familiar references. It also explores how postmodernism employs parody and pastiche to create new meanings from previous works. Finally, it notes that self-reflexive media is aware of its own constructed nature and references its medium or narrative techniques.

1. Postmodernism
Because ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Popular Culture in Everyday Life: Week 4

2. Today’s Lecture
• Understand key elements in postmodernism
• Identify postmodernism in popular culture
• Examining the relationships between audiences and
mass media

3. Antiquity
5000 BC - c. 5XX CE
Renaissance
c. 14XX - c. 17XX CE
c. 17XX - 18XX CE
Enlightenment
Romanticism
18XX - 18XX CE
Postmodernism
Mid 19XX CE - Now?
c. 5XX - c. 14XX CE
Middle Ages
c. 18XX - 19XX CE
Modernism

4. Modernism Postmodernism

5. • Mid-19th Century - Mid-20th Century
(…ish)
• ‘Modern’:
• Word usually associated with the
now, new, contemporary, current
• Value placed on original ideas/works
Modernism

6. Modernism
• Grand narratives!
• Industrial revolution
• Invention of Capitalism/Communism
• Political ideologies
• Belief in a scientific/technological solution or
future
• Optimism:
• Experimentation with reality
• Finding knowledge

7. Did we get there?

8. Postmodernism
• Disappointment: Pessimism,
skepticism about promised progress
• Post-human?: Misery, now
streaming in HD
• Globalisation!: flow of ideas and
information
• Abandonment of absolutes and rise
of relatives
• Admiration of intertextuality
(reproduced/reworked material)

9. Postmodernism and Pop Culture
• It forms the basis of our [textual]
understanding of Pop Culture
• It allows for cultural currency
(cultural capital, a.k.a. ‘cred’)

10. David Throsby (1997) on cultural capital:
• “Firstly, it may be tangible, existing in the form
of buildings, locations, objects, art works,
which are endowed with cultural significance. It
includes, but is not limited to, tangible cultural
heritage.” (p. 14)
• “Secondly, cultural capital may be intangible,
occurring as intellectual capital in the form of
ideas, practices, beliefs and values which are
shared by a group […] The stock of intellectual
capital thus defined can decay through neglect
or can increase through new investment. (p.
15)”

11. Pillars of Postmodernity in Pop Culture
• Intertextuality
• Parody & Pastiche
• Self-reflexivity

12. Texts
• Texts: works or media ‘read’ by an audience
• E.g. ‘Let’s eat grandma’ vs. ‘Let’s eat, grandma’
• 🏃💨
🚽🏃
🚽💥💩
• ¯_(ツ)_/¯
• Texts are made to trigger a response or carry information, up to the reader to be
‘literate’ in the way in which the message is understood
• Texts carry meaning (semiotics)

13. Intertextuality
• “…among the many things that postmodern intertextuality
challenges are both closure and single, centralised
meaning. Its willed and wilful provisionality rests largely
upon its acceptance of the inevitable textual infiltration of
prior discursive practices.” (Hutcheon, 1988, p. 127)
• Intertextuality allows us to interpret media (texts) through
elements taken/borrowed/referenced from other media
(texts).

14. BioShock Infinite

15. The LEGO Movie

16. • Intertextuality helps us understand
popular culture by using familiar
elements and reframing them
• An inevitable consequence of access
to information?
• Postmodernism questions the
idea of originality in a
connected world
• Allows for the use of subtle references
such as easter eggs and callbacks
• Progressively, tropes and conventions
give way to archetypes and genres

18. It’s not all about witty jokes…
• Intertextuality allows us to understand the rules or
expectations of the media we consume
Open the pod
bay doors?
‘It’s high noon’
His ultimate is charging
Breaking news: Tweeting our
way to nuclear armageddon

19. Archetypes
• ‘Universally’ recognisable types/forms/roles created by a
collective memory of repeated images/texts
Mad Scientist Old Martial Arts Shifu

20. Stranger Things
It
The Goonies
Super 8

21. Pastiche
• Pastiche: celebrates or pays homage to a
style or a text.
• “According to Babich (1994, p. 102) ``the
pastiche-paradocilarity of the
postmodern, is double coding, it is
deliberate and causal, disdaining high
culture even as it offers these very icons
for the consumption of mass reception of
culture''. Jameson (1990), on a similar
theme, proposes that the consequence of
this rejection or popularisation of high
culture is that cultural production is driven
back inside the mind resulting in a search
for a historical past through pop images
and stereotypes.” (Goulding, 2000, p. 839)

22. 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. Pastiche is blank parody, parody that has
lost its sense of humor […]. (Jameson, 1990, p. 3)

24. E.T. Carrie
Children of the Corn

25. Parody
• Parody: mocking using familiar
elements.
• Lukens: “a parody reminds us of
something known, then gives fresh
pleasure by duplicating form that
contrasts to new and humours
meaning” (p. 224)

26. “Although writers, illustrators, and artists may create texts
that are intertextual and parodic in nature, it is the reader
and/or viewer who interpret the texts; further, interpretation of
verbal or visual text as intertextual or parodied is dependent
on recognition of knowledge of the original text.” (Pantaleo,
2010, p. 250)

27. Self-reflexivity
• Media is aware of its nature
• Fourth wall break
• References to its own medium
or narrative
The LEGO Movie

28. Erased (Boku dake ga Inai Machi -『僕だけがいない街』)

29. Other terms to look out for…
• Genre agnosticism: not committed to the standards of a
genre, breaking the conventions of genres
• Metanarratives: narratives outside of the diegesis
• Running gags, callbacks: repetition of comedic elements
• …and more!

30. In Summary
• Postmodernism is (better) understood
as a disillusion or rejection to the ideals
of modernism
• Intertextuality allows us to understand
the texts around us (because it’s all be
done before?)
• Postmodernism makes use of previous
works through parody and pastiche to
create new meaning
• Self-reflexivity makes the text and the
audience aware of the consumption of
said text

31. References
Goulding, Christina (2000) "The commodification of the past, postmodern pastiche, and
the search for authentic experiences at contemporary heritage attractions", European
Journal of Marketing, Vol. 34 Issue: 7, pp.835-853
Hutcheon, Linda (1988). A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London.
Routledge
Jameson, F. (1990), ``Post modernism and consumer society'', in Foster, H. (Ed.), Post
Modern Culture, Pluto, London
Pantaleo, Sylvia (2010). ‘Ed Vere’s The Getaway’, in Lawrence Sipe and Sylvia Pantaleo
(eds.) Postmodern Picturebooks: Play, Parody, and Self-Referentiality. London. Routledge,
Throsby, David (1997) ‘Sustainability and culture some theoretical issues', International
Journal of Cultural Policy, 4(1), 7-19