Stereotypes

according to http://uktribes.com, my persona seems to fit under the stereotypes of Young Alts, due to the description given;


'They’ll read about or listen to a huge variety of bands and try Skater, Emo and even Urban fashions. They also love a lot of mainstream fashion and music. The Young Alts make for a largely safe and non-judgemental Tribe in which to experiment with all of these styles.As they advance into later years, Young Alts specialise and move into different Tribes, but while they are still deciding they are some of the most voracious consumers out there: music, magazines, clothes makeup and haircuts are all sampled and discarded with abandon.

Young Alts are wide eyed to the world and can be influenced by TV, radio and mainstream media. Some of them are still listening to their parents! Of course, the biggest influence is the playground and their friendship groups, and they constantly scour specialist magazines and the internet for news and clues about their favourite scenes.

Young Alts generally adopt their passions from Emos, Scene Kids, Indie Scenesters and Hipsters and rarely create a trend for themselves. Their huge buying power combined with this predictable nature makes them a hugely exciting market. Careful analysis of social media can put marketers ahead of the curve, as can access to Young Alt tastemakers like Zane Lowe.'

Why are some media products described as postmodern? essay plan

Intertextual references: film within a film e.g. inglorious basterds

Hyperreality – the arches on a mcdonalds ‘m’ It is just an ‘m’ yet it means good food due to the association with it.
Self-reflexivity: this involves the seemingly paradoxical combination of self-consciousness and some sort of historical grounding

Irony: Post modernism subverts conventions and negotiates contradictions through irony

Boundaries: Post modernism challenges the boundaries between genres, art forms, theory and art, high art and the mass media, blurring the boundaries of genres.

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

POSTMODERNISM, QUESTIONS/CHALLENGES THE CONVENTIONS OF EVERYTHING.
It challenges, genre conventions, gender stereotypes, racial stereotypes, social stereotypes etc. For example, the conventions of what is right and what is wrong within society are blurred.
Scott Pilgrim
• Intertextual references of old games
• Action/love/adventure movie – blurs boundares – fits into more than one thing.
Kick-Ass
• Female hero – not stereotypical ‘damsel in distress’
• Soundtrack comprised of many other superhero film soundtracks put together.
• Little girl with guns/ killing people/swearing unrealism is realistic its unrealistic yet we believe it to be real else the film wouldn’t work

Kramers Theory

Jonathan Kramer
1. Is not simply a repudiation of modernism or its continuation, but has aspects of both a break and an extension
2. Is, on some level and in some way, ironic – Timbaland having animal sounds etc layered behind the track.
3. Does not respect boundaries between sonorities and procedures of the past and of the present
4. Challenges barriers between 'high' (classical) and 'low' (pop, rock, dance etc) styles e.g. Dan Black- Symphonies.
5. Shows disdain for the often-unquestioned value of structural unity – boundaries blurred.
6. Questions the mutual exclusivity of elitist (classical) and populist (pop) values – questions whether they merge together or not.
7. Avoids totalizing forms (e.g., does not want entire pieces to be tonal or serial or cast in a prescribed formal mold)
8. Considers music not as autonomous but as relevant to cultural, social, and political contexts – doesn’t just operate on its own, relevant within cultural, social and political things. E.g. charity singles, Diamonds - Sierra Leone
9. Includes quotations of or references to music of many traditions and cultures – taking elements from different cultures e.g. Kanye West – Drunk & Hot Girls and Can- Sing Swan Song
10. Considers technology not only as a way to preserve and transmit music but also as deeply implicated in the production and essence of music e.g. DJ Shadow, auto tune etc.
11. Embraces contradictions (different to what you expect)
12. Distrusts binary oppositions
13. Includes fragmentations and discontinuities e.g. sampling things, uses sound effect only once.
14. Encompasses pluralism and eclecticism
15. Presents multiple meanings and multiple temporalities
16. Locates meaning and even structure in listeners, more than in scores, performances, or composers – depends on how it relates to you as a person, different cultural expectations etc. has any meaning you want.

The Heartache and Lullabies mix

Title of the mix because all the songs are either about having fun or love or whatever, but most are very melodic like lullabies (apart from the odd one or two!







1) Trouble by NeverShoutNever! (Reminds me of highschool and my first girlfriend)
2) Miss Sobriety by Cute Is What We Aim For (Reminds me of growing up and going separate ways with friends)
3) Lying Is The Most Fun A Girl Can Have Without Taking Her Clothes Off by Panic! At The Disco (reminds me of my teenage years so far)
4) Forever And Always by Bullet For My Valentine (falling in love and forgetting the complications)
5) If it Means a Lot to You by A Day To Remember (summer ’09)
6) Remembering Sunday (live) by All Time Low (how in life nothing goes the way its supposed to )
7) Fireworks by You Me At Six (reminds me of losing people who I was really close to)
8) Cute Without The 'E' (Cut From The Team) by Taking Back Sunday (being stabbed in the back)
9) Small Talk by Saving Aimee We're The Good Guys (I sung this in the microphone at the bands concert! unforgettable)
10) (I Used To Make Out With) Medusa by Bring Me The Horizon (destresses me through its raw sound)
11) Dammit by Blink 182 (reminds me of Reading festival & my childhood memorys)
12) Blunt Cruisin' by Asher Roth (good times with the lads)
13) Young by Hollywood Undead (feeling like society is against my generation)
14) Let's Hang The Landlord by The King Blues (fun filled punk rock song!)
15) I Love College by Asher Roth (summer ’10)
16) Last Train Home by Lostprophets (is like a backing track to every good memory)

“How have your research and planning skills progressed and allowed you to make more creative decisions?”

At A level, my research and planning skills have progressed and allowed me to make more creative decisions, which can be seen from looking at my AS music magazine foundation portfolio and my A2 music video blog.
At AS, I used many things for my research and planning, which I have improved upon and added to at A2. In AS I used Youtube to find the style of music artists to incorporate into my music magazine, therefore giving it a more authentic and realistic feel. I used Blogger to present my work in an easily interpreted way so my peers and teachers could evaluate my ideas and comment on them, thus using web 2.0 to help improve my final piece of work. Within my blog, I used slideshare to share my slideshow presentations on my blog to also let people see what I was doing and to give feedback on. I used Tubechop to show specific parts of footage so that I could interpret the style into my own work and see if other people agreed that it would enhance my work, and to add to my knowledge, I used Wikipedia and Google in the way of the DIKY Triangle by Tim O’ Reilly, I gained data from Google and Wikipedia, extracted information that was relevant to my task, gained the knowledge for example of specific style conventions of a genre of music, and used my wisdom to understand it and use my knowledge within my work to create a realistic looking music magazine.
However, at A2, I used these same methods, and various others, showing a very articulated knowledge of research and planning which allowed me to make more creative decisions. My use of youtube, to gain understanding of conventions for my music video let me have the knowledge to question and subvert those conventions to make my music video more creative and interesting, and I used google and wikipedia turning my knowledge from the previous year of usage of these tools into wisdom as I learnt to incorporate more of my researched knowledge into my music video enhancing it greatly. I used blogger not only to gain feedback, but to see other peoples ideas and plans for their media products and though how the could enhance my own, along with the addition of using widgets on my blog for example the weather forecast to tell me when it was a good day to shoot my video and pictures. The introduction of my Macbook Pro led to even faster and simpler compiling of knowledge through the internet and its simplicity, with the added bonus of professional editing programs to enhance and add to the creativeness of my research, letting me make animatics simply by the use of iMovie to create the effect of the type of music video I was creating.
Web 2.0 was a great influence on my planning and research, as interaction on websites such as Facebook, twitter and blogger all allowed a variety of peers to help enhance my ideas and offer other ones, to broaden my creative skills, by introducing new ways of adapting data and challenging it for effect within specific media conventions, which links into the UGC (user Generated Content) in which ‘amateur comment is now taken as seriously as information created by the professionals’ Andrew Keenan

4. What does the notion of creative teaching and learning imply?

In order to be creative, we have to know what to do to make it creative. For example we were told to make a music video to fit or challenge stereotypical conventions by choosing the song, shots and the whole video making it very creative. Therefore I believe that creativity has to be started by some guidelines that aren’t not very creative to make something very creative.

3. Is creativity an inevitable social good, invariably progressive, harmonious and collaborative; or is it capable of disruption, political critique a

Creativity seems capable of disruption and even anti social outcomes. For example Hitler was creative at killing many people very fast, this could be viewed as creative however it is not a good thing. Creativity is also as much individual as it is collective, as I worked independently on my music video, and was still successful in being creative and making my music video.

2. Is creativity a pervasive, ubiquitous feature of human activity, or a special faculty, either reserved for particular groups, individuals, or parti

Creativity is ubiquitous meaning everyone has the capacity to be clever, however, just because we have this capability doesn’t mean we necessarily use it, and therefore meaning that if we are forced into a situation where we have to be creative, we can be creative, shown through how being set the task to make a realistic looking music video, it shows the creative effort put in to make a very creative realistic music video.

1. Is creativity an internal cognitive function, or is it an external social or cultural phenomenon?

Creativity is an external social or cultural phenomenon, but only if we are forced into the situation, which requires us to be creative, for example the societal need to not conform within society for example the clothes we wear. This links also to the task of creating a music video that forced creativity due to needing to create a video that is interesting, and unique, which would therefore get me the best grade.

In what ways can Inglourious Basterds and Fight Club be considered postmodern? (needs completing)

Inglourious Basterds and Fight club can both be considered postmodern film's, as they both incorporate many post modernistic features, for example the heavily distributed intertextual references throughout the film, and the blurring of reality and fiction through various techniques between both media texts.

Inglourious Basterds, a 2009 war film by Quentin Tarantino, was a huge hit at the box office, grossing over $300,000,000 in theatres worldwide, making it Tarantino’s most successful film to date. The film is about a group of Jewish American Assassins, on a mission to kill any Nazi they come across and take no prisoners, with a mission to kill Hitler. The whole fantasy element which is evident from the start of the film as it is introduced ‘Once upon a time…’, and ends in the woods, a very generic setting for fairy tales, the fantasy of killing Hitler is a postmodern feature in its self, as it is trying to rewrite past events, due to the very evident historical truth that Hitler committed suicide, another postmodern element within this context is the fact that Hitler is assassinated by the race of people he is trying to destroy; the Jews.

Quentin Tarantino's foot fetish is another postmodern feature which occurs through many of his films, and is postmodern due to the fact he is putting the personal into the public, and although it is a very strange scene, it somehow fits the film giving a fairytale ‘cinderella’ element to it, also making the audience notice how it isn’t real life and is a fictional film, which is a very postmodern feature.

Within Inglorious Basterds, there are many intertextual references for example, The Battleship Potempkin with the Odessa steps sequence. The ‘film within a film’ Nations pride also has two Battleship Potempkin sequences, with the soldier being shot in the eye and the baby in a pram rolling across the town square. Also, within Inglourious Basterds the British officer makes a reference to the film 'White hell of pitz palu'.

Another postmodern feature of Inglorious Basterds is the over the ‘parodic' acting style, using famous well known actors such as Brad Pitt (Aldo Raine) playing the role of a South American Lieutenant, who is very merciless as he wants 100 Nazi scalps from every member of his assassin group. Mike Myers, who is best known for comedy films takes the part of a British Colonel. The high contrast in the sheer professionalism of a colonel portrayed by a comedian is entirely postmodern because the audiences buy into the idea that he is this serious colonel, rather than the Mike Myers from other well-known films.

The Violence within Inglourious Basterds is so brutal and gory, that it is comical. It adds to the sheer insanity of the fact they are killing humans as if it were a game, and shows the true brutality of these actors through violent acts, for example, when Eli Roth (Sgt. Donny Donowitz) smashes in the head of a German soldier with a baseball bat, commentating as if he were playing for a proper team and had hit a home run.

Fight Club a 1999 film by David Fincher movie which grossed over $100,000,000 worldwide. The film is about an unnamed character played by Ed Norton who is leading a very boring day-to-day life, so boring infact that he attends social meetings for problems he doesn’t even have. He meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a soap seller who is everything Ed Norton's character is not, he has the looks, the talent and the body Ed Norton’s character aspires to have. Tyler Durden and Ed Norton’s character start a Fight Club for men, to try re-masculinise men within today’s society. As the Fight Clubs grow. they start performing ‘homework assignments’ which are normally criminal or violence, which Tyler Durden had set to give everyone the chance to live their dreams and start afresh on a level playing field. This violent ‘justice’ for example threatening to kill a supermarket owner because he is running a store and not doing what he Tyler scares him into promising he will become what he always wanted to be. In a sense the contrasting element of pain giving pleasure is very postmodern as they are conflicting elements, along with more realistic sound effects which make the viewer question how much we tolerate what could be considered ‘fake’ sounding fights instead of convincing ‘real’ sounding ones.

One major postmodern aspect within Fight Club is the IKEA catalogue scene where everything in Ed Norton’s apartment is shown to be labeled and priced, linking to how the film teaches you that society is now overcome by consumer goods, and Tyler Durden proves that these materialistic things aren’t needed, by blowing up Ed Norton’s apartment to prove his point of "What you own ends up owning you".

Dan Black, DJ Shadow & Daft Punk Postmodernism

Participation
Daft Punk allows people to participate within 'harder, better, faster, stronger' through the use of an app which gives the sound samples used by Daft punk so anyone could attempt to replicate their song.

Modification
DJ Shadow uses modification to mix many various different sound samples to create his own brand new song, through the use of DJ decks and scratching etc.

Authenticity Disrupted
Dan black uses his music and video to emphasise that it is a copy of something else, nearly every element within the music video and song has been copied, except from its song lyrics.

Originality
Dan Black and DJ Shadow can all be questioned about their originality, as although they all use other songs, which is unoriginal, they create brand new, never before heard music which could be called 'original'.

Does knowing how to make it, or making it easy to reproduce make it less impressive?
yes it does kind of because it makes everybody feel like they have the same amount of skill as daft punk for example in the app, however, not everyone does it because everyone can try to recreate the songs, however it will never be exactly the same as the original song.

The Death Of Uncool - iPod Shuffle

1. Bloc Party – Song For Clay (Disappear Here)
2. The Blackout – I Know You Are, But What Am I
3. Asher Roth – She Don’t Wanna Man
4. Marina & The Diamonds – Obsessions
5. Lady Gaga – Eh,Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say)
6. 3OH!3 – Don’t Trust Me
7. Papa Roach – Days Of War
8. Panic At The Disco – But It’s Better If You Do
9. Forever The Sickest Kids – Breakdown
10. The All American Rejects – Dirty Little Secret

Fight club; possibly weaved into this music video?

just a quick blog to say i was watching this music video and it weaves fight club video into it (i think)
and uses subliminal messaging and many other conventions shown within the film.
one of my favourite songs, and now ive found intertextuality within it.
enjoy!

why scott pilgrim failed

Scott pilgrim only got $10 million in earnings and made almost half of its total on opening night, whilst its $60 million budget is extremely out of grasp.
Here are 5 reasons for why it was such a box office flop.


People Over 30 Don't Get It
The movie's marketing was such an accurate representation of the film I think it's fair to say that most of the people who saw ads for it had a good idea of what they were going to see, And they didn't want to see it. In particular people over the age of 30 didn't want to see it. It's a movie about the kinds of individuals anyone over 30 with a job would like to see introduced to a cattle prod, watching a kid whine about how he has to be in bands and stuff and hang out a lot is a very accurate representation of this whole film. It looked like a movie about kids, for kids. However, the target audience wasn’t as good as it seems as you will see in my next point.


People Under 30 Don't Get It
While Scott Pilgrim is about teens and recent teens, the way it goes about telling its story isn't exactly teen friendly. The film is full of video game culture references. However, it’s evident right from the movie's first frame where the Universal Pictures logo is redone using 8-bit graphics, which look like they were created for the original NES, which is when the target audience wasn’t even born, which is a pretty major mistake. The movie's steeped not just in video games, but in classic video game references which kids probably aren't interested in and even if they were, almost certainly wouldn't get. However, even more references that only an older generation would get are included in the film, such as a Seinfeld scene and the desert sequence is a reference to Wayne's World 2. For most kids, the Atari 2600 is just something you get on a t-shirt, and if you reference Super Mario Bros. 2 in a movie, there's a pretty good chance they won't know what it is.



Geeks Don't Get It
Scott Pilgrim is not exactly a geek film. This is a movie about a slacker musician who's biggest problem is choosing which of the two ‘hot’ girls he's dating he most wants to sleep with. He spends his nights hanging out at cool clubs where he rocks out on stage and his days planning another balls to the wall brawl with an enemy. This is a movie about guys who are in bands, not geeks sitting around in their parents' basements playing World of Warcraft. It doesn't have any geeks in it and, apparently, none of them showed up to see it either. Odds are most geeks simply didn't get the appeal of a movie about cool guys with guitars pretending to like video games and stayed home with an actual video game called Starcraft II.

People Hate Michael Cera
There's a reason this viral video containing a collection of shots in which Michael Cera gets punched in the face was insanely popular, and no it isn't because people were excited about Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. While he has his fans, people hate Michael Cera. In particular they hate that he always plays the same character and he did it again in Scott Pilgrim. Which is another reason it flopped, too many people hate the leading man.

Scott Pilgrim Is A Musical Without Songs
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a musical. Not because of the indie-rock soundtrack, there aren't really many songs in the film and there's definitely no dancing. Instead what Edgar Wright has done is take the musical format and apply it to, fighting. In a musical characters break into song and dance whenever there's something too big to be expressed by words. Scott Pilgrim uses its fights in the same way. Scott Pilgrim fights whenever there's something too big to express with dialogue, something too important to simply say. It's through these elaborate, colorful, fights that Scott's personality changes and grows. It's because of his fights that he eventually realizes he lacks self-respect, and when he gets some, that's part of a fight too. Except musicals aren't for everyone. the same things which people hate about musicals are present in the trailers and, whether they knew it or not, probably had a hand in keeping them away. Some people simply don't get musicals. Normally that's ok since there's a dedicated crowd of moviegoers who do get it, and show up for a musical anyway, but the musical moviegoer isn't showing up for a fight movie and neither did anyone else.

There were big expectations for Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, but only from the handful of people who'd already seen it. But it was always a movie without a specific audience. It's a broad movie built on a lot of different niche elements, and as much as we'd like to believe moviegoers are open-minded enough to step outside their comfort zone, most of the time they won't. The mistake was in thinking that all the different audiences Scott Pilgrim speaks to were the same audience, when they're not.

People say it's become cool to be a geek. That's not true. People have just started applying the word geek to cool people. Hipsters aren't geeks and geeks aren't rock musicians and rock musicians aren't old school gamers and aging gamers don't like musicals. In a perfect world none of that would matter and people would simply show up to the theater and be blown away by the innovative level of creativity on display in Scott Pilgrim, but you have to get them there first.

Maybe Universal could have lied more in the marketing, but it's hard to fault them for being honest about the movie they had to offer. They were proud of Edgar Wright's work, and advertised it accordingly. Deadline says Universal knew it would flop, but they also knew it was good, and simply didn't care. Perhaps they're banking on it finding new life as a massive cult hit on DVD, and that's exactly what it deserves to be. Scott Pilgrim's a flop and it'll take a minor miracle to turn that around before theater owners give up and stop showing it. But maybe, if it's lucky, Pilgrim will find new life somewhere down the road as a must-see Netflix rental. Whether they're potheads or nerds, ravers or comic book readers, they'll thank you for it. It's Scott Pilgrim fans vs. the World.

Kick-Ass Soundtrack

1."Stand Up" - The Prodigy

2."Kick Ass (Radio Edit)" - Mika vs. RedOne

3."Can't Go Back" - Primal Scream

4."There's a Pot Brewin'" - The Little Ones

5."Omen" - The Prodigy

6."Make Me Wanna Die" - The Pretty Reckless

7."Banana Splits (Kick-Ass Film Version)" - The Dickies

8."Starry Eyed" - Ellie Goulding

9."This Town Ain't Big Enough For The Both Of Us" - Sparks

10."We're All In Love" -The New York Dolls

The New York Dolls - We're All in Love Vidéo banana_split sélectionnée dans Musique

11."Bongo Song" - Zongamin

12."Per Qualche Dollaro in Più (For a Few Dollars More)"- Ennio Morricone

13."Bad Reputation" - The Hit Girls

14."An American Trilogy"-Elvis Presley

Pluralism and relativism

Pluralism is a belief that there is no one answer to anything, which is much like postmodernism. There are two types of pluralism:

Firstly there is Normative pluralism/relativism (or nihilism) is the acceptance of all narratives, expressions and norms, claiming that no one is better than all the others, which is a very bleak view.

Secondly, (the view we have looked at) there is a kind of postmodernism which is pluralist in the sense that it accepts different views, without denying that something is better than other things. For example accepting someone’s view, but not agreeing with it. It is this second kind, which allows some form of rebuttal to criticisms of Postmodernism (like those put forward by Jameson) and perhaps stops it being so annoyingly smug a theory.

Hollywood Grand Narratives

Remember Marshall McLuhan view that 'the medium is the message', this is certainly the case with Hollywood cinema. In terms of medium, film genre serves as the medium


There is a view that only 7 narratives exist




Overcoming the Monster A terrifying, all-powerful, life-threatening monster whom the hero must confront in a fight to the death. An example of this plot is seen in Beowulf, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Dracula.
Rags to Riches Someone who has seemed to the world quite commonplace is shown to have been hiding a second, more exceptional self within. Think the ugly duckling, Jane Eyre and Clark Kent.
The Quest From the moment the hero learns of the priceless goal, he sets out on a hazardous journey to reach it. Examples are seen in The Odyssey, The Aeneid, The Count of Monte Cristo, and Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Voyage and Return The hero or heroine and a few companions travel out of the familiar surroundings into another world completely cut off from the first. While it is at first marvellous, there is a sense of increasing peril. After a dramatic escape, they return to the familiar world where they began. Alice in Wonderland and The Time Machine are obvious examples; but Brideshead Revisited and Gone with the Wind also embody this basic plotline.
Comedy Following a general chaos of misunderstanding, the characters tie themselves and each other into a knot that seems almost unbearable; however, to universal relief, everyone and everything gets sorted out, bringing about the happy ending. Shakespeare’s comedies come to mind, as do Jane Austen’s perfect novels.
Tragedy A character through some flaw or lack of self-understanding is increasingly drawn into a fatal course of action which leads inexorably to disaster. King Lear, Madame Bovary, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Bonnie and Clyde—all flagrantly tragic.
Rebirth There is a mounting sense of threat as a dark force approaches the hero until it emerges completely, holding the hero in its deadly grip. Only after a time, when it seems that the dark force has triumphed, does the reversal take place. The hero is redeemed, usually through the life-giving power of love. Many fairy tales take this shape; also, works like Silas Marner and It’s a Wonderful Life.
Jean-François Lyotard
Lyotard rejected what he called the “grand narratives” or universal “meta-narratives.”

Basically, the grand narratives (big stories) refer to the great theories of history, science, religion, politics. For example, Lyotard rejects the ideas that everything is knowable by science or that as history moves forward in time, humanity makes progress, and therefore he also rejects that everyone follows one of three grand narratives, and introduced the idea of micronarratives.
Lyotard favours ‘micronarratives’ (little stories) that can go in any direction, that reflect diversity, that are unpredictable, which show that everyone is different and everyone has their own stories.

Yet More Criticism Of Postmodernism

Schematic Differences between
Modernism and Postmodernism
Modernism
Postmodernism
romanticism/symbolism
paraphysics/Dadaism
purpose
play
design
chance
hierarchy
anarchy
matery, logos
exhaustion, silence
art object, finished word
process, performance
distance
participation
creation, totalization
deconstruction
synthesis
antithesis
presence
absence
centering
dispersal
genre, boundary
text, intertext
semantics
rhetoric
paradigm
syntagm
hypotaxis
parataxis
metaphor
metonymy
selection
combination
depth
surface
interpretation
against interpretation
reading
misreading
signified
signifier
lisible (readerly)
scriptible
narrative
anti-narrative
grande histoire
petite histoire
master code
idiolect
symptom
desire
type
mutant
genital, phallic
polymorphous
paranoia
schizophrenia
origin, cause
difference-difference
God the Father
The Holy Ghost
Metaphysics
irony
determinacy
indeterminacy
transcendence
immanence

(SOURCE: Hassan "The Culture of Postmodernism" Theory, Culture, and Society, V 2 1985, 123-4.)

Further Criticisms Of Postmodernism

Rosenau (1993) Rosenau identifies seven contradictions in Postmodernism:
1. Its anti-theoretical position is essentially a theoretical stand.
2. While Postmodernism stresses the irrational, instruments of reason are freely employed to advance its perspective.
3. The Postmodern prescription to focus on the marginal is itself an evaluative emphasis of precisely the sort that it otherwise attacks.
4. Postmodernism stress intertextuality but often treats text in isolation.
5. By adamently rejecting modern criteria for assessing theory, Postmodernists cannot argue that there are no valid criteria for judgment.
6. Postmodernism criticizes the inconsistency of modernism, but refuses to be held to norms of consistency itself.
7. Postmodernists contradict themselves by relinquishing truth claims in their own writings.

Jean-François Lyotard

Lyotard rejected what he called the “grand narratives” or universal “meta-narratives.”

Basically, the grand narratives (big stories) refer to the great theories of history, science, religion, politics. For example, Lyotard rejects the ideas that everything is knowable by science or that as history moves forward in time, humanity makes progress, and therefore he also rejects that everyone follows one of three grand narratives, and introduced the idea of micronarratives.
Lyotard favours ‘micronarratives’ (little stories) that can go in any direction, that reflect diversity, that are unpredictable, which show that everyone is different and everyone has their own stories.