--> e.g.: Marxism : long-term emancipationist goal guaranteed by history itself.
Meta-narrative: universal, absolute or ultimate truths
Rejection of Grand Narrative
Lyotard & Baudrillard simly reject the idea of the 'grand narrative', that there is any 'universal truth' in literature.
Postmodernists argue that narratives become more and more episodic. See for example Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction or Inglourious Basterds. Ien Ang considers TV as a main influence in decentralisation and fragmentation. Anne Friedberg counts it amongst the numerous symptoms of the current 'postmodern condition'.
Alain J.-J. Cohen has identified a new phenomenon in the history of film,
the ‘hyper-spectator’. ‘Such spectator, who may have a deep knowledge of
cinema, can reconfigure both the films themselves and filmic fragments into new
and novel forms of both cinema and spectatorship, making use of the vastly
expanded access to films arrived at through modern communications equipment
and media. The hyper-spectator is, at least potentially, the material (which here
means virtual) creator of his or her hyper-cinematic experience’
Ien Ang in Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern
World (1996) suggests that ‘Television itself has undergone massive
postmodernization – manifested in a complex range of developments
such as pluralization, diversification, commercialization, commodification,
internationalization, decentralization – throwing established paradigms of how it
operates in culture and society into disarray.’
‘It is easy to produce an identikit postmodern hedonist: the archetypal decentred
subject with a maximum attention span of three minutes. Living in a world
of schizophrenically fragmented instants, he cruises the surfeit of channels
available to him, zapping his remote control and hopping between channels
and programmes unconnected by time, space or genre. He is unconcerned with
narrative, coherence or rational understanding: rather, he constructs a largely
random bricolage out of bits and pieces of television, which he connects with only
in a bored and distracted fashion...'
Anne Friedberg has argued that because we now have much control of how
we watch a film (through video/dvd), and we increasingly watch film in personal
spaces (the home) rather than exclusively in public places, ‘cinema and televison
become readable as symptoms of a “postmodern condition”, but as contributing
causes.’ In other words, we don’t just have films that are about postmodernism
or reflect postmodern thinking. Films have helped contribute to the postmodern
quality of life by manipulating and playing around with our conventional
understanding of time and space. ‘One can literally rent another space and time
when one borrows a videotape to watch on a VCR….the VCR allows man to
organize a time which is not his own…a time which is somewhere else – and to
capture it.’
Anne Friedberg: ‘The cinema spectator and the armchair equivalent – the home-
video viewer, who commands fast forward, fast reverse, and many speeds of
slow motion, who can easily switch between channels and tape; who is always to
repeat, replay, and return – is a spectator lost in but also in control of time. The
cultural apparatuses of television and the cinema have gradually become causes
for what is now…described as the postmodern condition.’
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