Thursday 10 May 2012

Relativism, Death of the Author,Modernism and Marxist film theory etc

Relativism: This is the concept of their being no validity or truth, and having no relative, subjective value according to differences in perception and consideration. The term is often used to refer to the context of moral principle and ethics are regarded as applicable in only limited context. The term often refers to truth relativism, which is concept of there being no absolute truth.

Death of the author-This is a essay produced by Roland Barthes in 1967. Barthes's essay argues against the traditional literacy criticisms practice of incorporating the intentions and biographical context of an author and an interpretation of a text, and instead argues that writing and creating are unrelated.
In this essay, Barthes argues against the method of reading an criticism which lies on the aspects of the authors identity, like their ethnicity, political views etc which are used to distill meaning from the author's work. In this type of criticism he experiences and biases of the author serve as an definitive explanation of the text. For Barthes, this method is flawed as "to give a text and author, and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it" is to impose a limit on the text.

Modernism: A modern thought, character or practice. The term is also used to describe the modernist movement in the arts, its set of cultural tendencies and associated cultural movements, which arises from the wide scale and far reaching changes of Western society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The development of the modern industrial societies and the rapid growth of cities, followed then by the horror of World War 1 where among the factors which developed modernism.

What are the differences between modernism and postmodernism?
Modernism is an encompassing label for a wide variety of cultural movements. Postmodernism is an centralized movement that named itself based on socio-political theory, although the term is used now to describe or refer to activities in the from the 20th century onwards which exhibit awareness of an reinterpret the modern. Postmodern theory asserts the attempt to canonize modernism after the fact that its doomed to major contradictions. 

Marxist Film Theory: Sergei Eisenstein and many other Soviet filmmakers in the 1920's expressed ideas/ideologies of Marxism through their films. The Hegelian dialectic was considered best displayed  in film editing through the Kuleshov experiment and the development of montage.
This approach towards Marxism and film-making was used to shun the use of the typical narrative structure which was associated with Hollywood film-making. Eisenstein chose to shun the narrative structure by get rod of the typical modernist individual protagonist central to films and he told stories where the action is moved by the group and the narrative or story is told through a clash of one image against the next(whether in composition, motion or idea) so that the audience is lulled into believing that they are watching something that has been constructed in the typical manner attributed with Hollywood, e.g. Jean Luc Goddard would employ radical editing and choice of subject matter, as well as subversive parody to heighten class consciousness and promote Marxist hegemony or dominant ideologies.

Fourth Wall technique: The fourth wall technique is the imaginary wall, at the front of the stage in a traditional  three walled box set in a proscenium theater, through which the audience see's the action in the world of the play and was made explicit by Denis Diderot, which extended the idea to the imaginary boundary between any fictional work and its audience. Speaking directly,acknowledging the audience through camera in film, TV or through the imaginary wall in a play is referred to as the "breaking the fourth wall" and is considered a technique of metafiction. As it deconstructs the boundaries which is normally set by the works of fiction.

Metaference: A metafiction technique which is situated in a work of fiction where characters display an awareness that they are in such a work, such as in film, books etc. This technique of metafiction is used in the Simpsons, when the characters are often seen mockingly referring to the show, the writers, Fox Network, known continuity errors or popular memes pertaining to the show as the show as a form of self parody. Another example is the one we see in the South Park episode, "More Crap", a trophy appears at the bottom of the screen to announce that South Park won an Emmy for "Make Love Not Warcraft". At the end of the episode "More Crap" Randy is awarded said trophy.

Aside: A dramatic device in which a character speaks to its audience. By convention, the audience is to realize that the character's speech is unheard by the other characters on stage. It may be addressed to the audience expressly (in character or not) or represent an unspoken thought.

Nihilism: Is the philosophical doctrine suggesting the negation of one or more putatively meaningful aspects of life. When nihilism is presented in the form of existential nihilism, argues that life is is without objective meaning, purpose or intrinsic value. Nihilism is also a characteristic that has been ascribed to time periods, for example Baudrillard and others have called post-modernity an nihilistic epoch.

The Postmodern condition: Used to describe the economic or cultural state or condition of society which is said to exist after modernity. Some scholars/academics would claim that modernity ended in the late 20th century, 1980's or the early 1990's replaced by post-modernity, while others extend modernity to cover the developments denoted by post-modernity, while some believe that modernity ended after world war 2. Post-modernity can also connote a personal response to a postmodern society, the conditions in a society which make it postmodern or the state of being which is associated with a postmodern society.

The Death of Postmodern and Beyond: The Death of Postmodern and Beyond  is an essay by the British cultural critic Alan Kirby. The essay argues that postmodernism as a cultural period is over and is given way to a new paradigm based on digital technology which he calls "psuedomodernism, (changed to "digimodernism" in the book). The essay has been criticized for its vague reference to the banality of current texts. Kirby defines "pusedomodernism" as a text which is created by the audience, for the audience but then places a range of wide range of texts under this category that seem not to belong like The Blair Witch Project. Kirby says these texts lack the self aware irony that is associated with postmodernism. 

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