Post Modernism Lecture notes - week 5

Brokeback Mountain and The Death of the Author 

• Sustaining stories with different cultural points of view 
• cultural original = appropriated the past
• Roland Barthes 1915 - 1980 writer, thinker interested with languages complexities 
• text a tissue of quotations from innumerable centres of culture 
• text anything read - photograph, graphic, etc
• Author limits that text, when found text is explained 
• understand people and context of what is written giving meaning away to us (critic) 
• Hie-racy up for question - the reader, text unity lies in it's destination not in it's source 
• much to do with our experiences 
• "the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author." 
• Death of the Author - away into the subject, creates popular participation and democratic - our own view 
• collage and montage becomes primary form of post modern discourse
• combines fragments and pieces 
• e.g LHOOQ - Death of Author Da Vinci and Duchamp changing meaning 
• Sheerie Levine killing off Walker Evan's photo 
• Burberry - Burberry check with text inscribed, luxury brand  
• Burberry hat - imitation of existing brand, Burberry fighting for their meaning of their 'text' back 
• Banksy classic death of the Author 
• Mickey Mouse - associated ideas controlled by cooperation that wants one representation 

• Ronald Mc Donald - fun, family meaning 
• Nick UT - children running from a Napalm if holocaust cast a shadow, a human stain still struggling 
• Banksy created america as it wants to see itself 
• the 'canon' - a term applied to cultural product generally accepted as superior to or more significant - the elite' 
• Slash fiction - fan fiction of one or more media characters in a relationship as plot element and changing the situations and stories they are involved in 
• 'digital plastic that can form together' 
• Star Trek, Fiction centres the bromance of Kirk and Spock 
• Harry Potter slash art - Parady = characters in Harry Potter universe in Brockback mountain scenerio  smashing together to create new version of it's self 
• Sweded - summarised reaction of popular culture using listed budgets and camcorder - remaking 
• movies represent fixed version, copy righted 
• 'mash - ups'
• Pride and Prejudice and zombies, Sense and Sensability and sea monsters - unlikely collision of Jane Austin and monsters 
• music mash up - combining music from one song with voice track of another - bring form and control 
• 'Hybrid Culture' 
• video mash ups - combination of movie sources 
• Trailer for Broke Mountain - trying to evoke seriousness and importance 
• Brokeback to the Future - understands language and marketing of film what's important of the original text, to break and reform 

• 'Bush and Blair' : At the Gay Bar - mash up of real existing people and stories
• Forest Gump - expertly spliced with news footage to make realistic scene 
• walls and boundaries collapse, sense of right and wrong up for taking
• Wikipedia - controlled by it's users, model of multiple person's meanings and views 
• collaborative - non linear navigation 
• post modern emphasises role of individual doesn't distinct between low and high forms, rejects rigid genre boundaries and mixing ideas
• doesn't approach fragmentation as tragic but rather celebrates it 
• no definitive answer only pieces 
• resists monolith universals and encourages fractured, fluid, multiple perspectives 
• Wikipedia is a post modern project, doesn't belong to any person's view - a crowd's idea