Postmodernism Lecture 4 - Word Definitions

• Avant-garde is the French word for vanguard meaning a group or work that is innovative or inventive on more levels, (i.e. subject, medium, technique, style or relationship to context). Avant-garde pushes the known boundaries of acceptable traditional art with revolutionary, cultural or political implications. It explores new possibilities by taking risks.
• Nostalgia being sentimental or having wistful affection for the past. In post modernism that would apply to constantly looking back where we were at our happiest - imprisoning us in the past.
• Appropriation is the direct copying of an image or object from an identified source by an artist who represents it in a different context, altering it’s meaning and questioning originality and authenticity.
• Parody is a humorously exaggerated production imitating a writer, artist, or genre.
• Irony is the use of words/images to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning by using a contrast for rhetorical and humourous effect.
• Ideology is a set of beliefs and ideals held by society, organisations, communities, individuals.
• Genre is a collection of instantly recognisable stylistic features, in film it’s where cameras are placed and how films are edited in order to tell the story. Audiences never come to a new film without some preconceptions and anticipation of aesthetics and narrative set by genre, this anticipation evokes a fairly limited repertoire of ideas such as: environment, look of characters, locations, narrative, structure etc. Genre is essential because without the limitations they have on film experience, everything would be possible and that makes nothing special. E.g. In the Harry Potter world the time turner part is rational and believable to that world where as Superman turning back time by flying around the Earth so fast is goes back… It doesn’t work because that genre doesn't allow that.
• Dogmatism/Dogma laid down expectation of how something is going to be. Dogmatism is a term everyone adheres too ie a blonde going to Hollywood.