Postmodernism Lecture 7 - Key Words

• Narcissism - self-centredness extreme interest arising from failure to distinguish the self from external objects.
• Metafiction, Meta prefix means to reflect upon itself so Meta fiction is fiction about fiction it is not the same as meta narrative, it breaks realism by self consciously reflecting upon its own nature, it’s methods of production and how the genre intends to effect the reader/consumer - it’s contextualised by deconstruction.
• Intertextuality is the interrelationship between texts, it refers to the links between text that is up to us as an audience to make. It shapes meaning by interconnecting similar or related works of text that reflect and influence an audience’s interpretation. Being in postmodern era every idea has been thought of so all that’s left is to adapt, intertextuality is not theft - it’s inevitable, every film builds on and from what has gone before, but it strikes the audience as new and distinct.
• Mise en abyme is the sense of being caught between surfaces/representations that we cant get out of, there’s nothing external, for example standing in between two mirrors is the visual experience of seeing as a result an infinite reproduction of one's image reflected into itself. It means ‘placing into infinity’ or ‘placing into the abyss’. Also known as the Droste effect where a picture appears within itself. 
• The 4th wall is the invisible wall that separates the characters and audience, it’s the wall the characters in a film have to look at in order to address an audience so breaking the 4th wall is breaking the boundaries. In most films and tv series the actors act as if they cannot see the audience.