Perspectives: Terminology

When studying postmodernism in film it is important to understand common terminology used in the area in order to have a better understanding of the subject. below are a list with relative definitions to the theories of modernity, post modernity, structuralism and post structuralism.

Eclectic Nostalgia: the term eclectic means to range widely, to have a large base from which to draw knowledge, nostalgia is the wistfulness to return to a previous state of being, a homesickness. Eclectic nostalgia in postmodernism is the conscious desire to draw from things of the past to rethink how we read a subject of our time 

Aleatory: refers to the denotation of randomness.

Bricolage: seems to to a similar concept to something eclectic, a bricolage construction is made of many different things.

Pastiche: the imitation of another artists work.

Flippant: to not be serious or respectful.

Fabulation: term coined by Robert Scholes referring to the large amount of magical realism novels in the 20th century.

Simulacra: to represent something or something unsatisfactorily.

Fragmentary: shattered, broken, not as one whole but of different segments.

Superabundance: referring to something which is everywhere is great amounts.

High modernism: popular in 1950-1960 it dictates a striving for confidence in science and technology to reorder society and the natural world.

Capitalist: society which believes in private property and driving profit of money.

The enlightenment project: a period of time which humans began to story holding so much faith in religion and myth and began to question the natural order and reason of everything around them, it was a time of great categorisation of flora, fauna and everything outside these.

Modernity: the conscious effort to find new ways in which to perceive and view the way the world is.

Irreducible: something that cannot be broken down any further, the smallest value of something.

Structuralism: a term used to name theories and philosophies associated with finding universal,  fundamental and completely irreducible truths about how the world works. 

Ahistorical: a term used to describe something that sits outside of history, something that has always been and always will be.

Objective: a judgement which is uninfluenced by personal feeling or opinion.

Universal: something that is true across all things or over an entire subject.

Definitive: the final version of something.

Post-Structuralism: a term given to name theories and philosophies relating to confronting the authority of structuralist theories.

Reflexivity: a state of creation and destruction, when something has an impact on a subject but the subject also continually influences its creator in cycles. 

'The Unreliable Narrator': the term was coined in 1961 by Wayne C. Booth, it refers to a characters story which is untrustworthy, a tale which cannot be taken at face value. It is used to create plot twists, emphasis character alignment in a higher plot. It is used in a way as to not tell as story objectively, in order to make the audience perceive the story in a specific tone.