Grand Narrative Definition

Any theory or intellectual system which attempts to provide a comprehensive explanation of human experience and knowledge. Religion, science, Freudian psychology and political ideologies such as Marxism, nationalism and neoliberalism all produce competing grand narratives (also referred to as master narratives and metanarratives). Grand narratives are particularly associated with Enlightenment ( q.v. ) and modernist thinking, in that they are organized around the ‘story’ of human progress and perfectibility. Postmodern thinkers, most prominently Jean-François Lyotard, have pointed to what they see as the dangers inherent in such ‘totalizing’ visions of history.

In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979) Lyotard contends that blind faith placed in the singular explanations provided by the grand narratives of modernity has led to an intolerance of difference. This intolerance led directly to the horrors of the 20th c. Instead, Lyotard argues, we should embrace a multiplicity of theoretical viewpoints in order to appreciate the heterogeneity of human experience, and employ petits récits , ‘little narratives’, to enable a better comprehension of and ability to respond to, local, contingent and temporary circumstances.

POMO - definition 2

Label given to Cultural forms since the 1960s that display the following qualities:

Self reflexivity: this involves the seemingly paradoxical combination of self-consciousness and some sort of historical grounding

Irony: Post modernism uses irony as a primary mode of expression, but it also abuses, installs, and subverts conventions and usually negotiates contradictions through irony

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

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

POMO - definition 1

Postmodern texts deliberately play with meaning. They are designed to be read by a literate (ie experienced in other texts) audience and will exhibit many traits of intertextuality. Many texts openly acknowledge that, given the diversity in today's audiences, they can have no preferred reading (check out your Reception Theory) and present a whole range of oppositional readings simultaneously.
Many of the sophisticated visual puns used by advertising can be described as postmodern.
Postmodern texts will employ a range of referential techniques such as bricolage, and will use images and ideas in a way that is entirely alien to their original function (eg using footage of Nazi war crimes in a pop video).