Notes

Postmodern Aesthetics

Extreme Self-reflexivity

When a medium is self-aware, often breaking down or critiquing its tropes or cliches to their core.

Parody

When a medium creates references to other works, utilising the most recognisable aspects that made the original works stand out.

High and low culture

High culture is associated with the top end of social status. For example fine art, expensive resturaunts, and sports cars. Meanwhile low culture is associated with the masses. For example mass produced items, pop music, and other everyday consumables or experiences.

Retro pastiche

Using elements and styles from the past and utilising them in a different context.

A media text I identify as parody:

The Boys is a TV show based on a comic book by the same name about superheroes. The series is a parody and social commentary of superhero culture, often breaking down the genre's tropes and turning them on their head.

Intertextuality

• A way of 'standing on the shoulders of giants'

• Supported by what has come before

• Not simply copying or repeating but adding something new to something that already existsin the literature and body of artworks

Intertextuality is "a mosaic of quotations; any text is a absorption and transformation of another." (Kristeva 85, cited in Moi 37).

Roland Barthes on intertextuality: "Any text is a new tissue of past citations. Bits of code, formulae, rythmic models, fragments of social languages, etc., pass into the text and redistributed within it, for there is always language before and around the text."

Three modes of Intertextuality

• Obligatory

  • Understanding requires knowledge of the prior text

• Optional

  • Relationship to prior text exists but is not essential

• Accidental

  • No intention of intertextual relationship