Postmodernism

"The tenets of our dominant ideology... are what is being contested by postmodernism: from the notion of authorial originality and authority to the separation of the aesthetic from the political. Postmodernism teaches that all cultural practices have an ideological subtext which determines the conditions of the very possibility of their production of meaning."
Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism .

Postmodernism

• Is not simply a literary phenomenon (architecture, art too)
• By necessity, it challenges from within (so both uses and deliberately abuses)
• De-constructs (Focuses on processes, on "master narratives" and on the systems of production and reception of meaning, on signs as signifies)
• Is inclusive: challenges the metaphor of a "center" to which there will be a "margin"; uses high and low (pop) culture, mixes art forms, mixes genres, gives space to those traditionally excluded or marginalized (eg: women, homosexuals, blacks)
• Tools: irony, parody, (intertextuality), revisionism, fragmentation, juxtaposition, experimentation