Monday, 7 February 2011

Claude Levi Strauss - Genre

Levi Strauss developed the theory of 'bricolage'. Bricolage is a change that takes place giving traditional objects or language a new, often subversive, meaning and context.

A very obvious example was the use of a safety pin by punks as a piercing. Strauss believed that texts were constructed from various parts of other texts, which means that all texts used elements from other texts in order to create something new. That DOESN'T make it postmodern. However, for a text to become postmodern, it deliberately takes elements from outside its 'genre' and makes you notice them (like the safety pin piercing).
Levi-Strauss saw any text as constructed out of socially recognizable debris from other texts. He saw that writers construct texts from other texts by a process of:
Addition Deletion Substitution Transposition

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