Grant Morrison 's run on Animal Man featured the central character slowly becoming aware of his own fictional nature. He eventually confronted Morrison himself in the pages of the comic. No matter, though; the Writer is soon killed off. In Final Crisis Morrison again! Superman wears literal Plot Armor and fights a parasitic vampire symbolizing darkness in comics in 4th dimensional metafictional space.
John Byrne's run on She-Hulk had the protagonist aware of the fact that she was in a comic, to the point where she would take shortcuts across advertisements in order to catch a crook. Officially — see the Marvel Universe Handbooks — the events in She-Hulk are in continuity but the metafictional gags are not. This same meta-knowledge is the driving gag behind DC's Ambush Bug.
Who happens to be insane, so all that stuff could just be in his head. Deadpool takes Medium Awareness to the next level.
He knows he's a fictional character and makes fun of comic book tropes and even the industry itself, and whenever he gets adapted to other media he's aware of that too, arguably making him THE postmodern comic book character. I even wrote my own page for this website and other wikis. Who says I don't go the extra mile? The Calvinverse is, if nothing else, very, very medium aware. Pony Pals Dirk Strider Edition is a defictionalization of the humorously defaced copy of a book the titular Homestuck character gave his friend Jane as a birthday present.
It begins with relatively normal comedic vandalism of the book, such making the main character's horse Acorn an immortal eldritch abomination. Then he's hauled off to hell to be judged by a cat, Dirk Strider himself, and Jeanne Betancourt, the original author of Pony Pals. The story quickly spirals downward into post-modernism as things get more and more meta and the characters try to revert the story to its original state.
Nigel Tomm's film adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye , which is 75 minutes of a blank blue screen. True Art Is Incomprehensible , indeed. A particularly egregious example of the term "post-modern" being misused can be found in the movie Inspector Gadget , where Dr. Claw says that his robotic hand makes him seem like "a post-modern Captain Hook.
In films starring The Muppets , the fourth wall is strong enough to keep the plot going- but no stronger. In addition to being an example as a scripted film shot on-location at a real-life historical anti-war riot , Medium Cool is named after Marshall McLuhan's book, The Medium Is The Message , which stated that TV is the ultimate "cool" medium, whereas theater and, say, flash-mobs would be a "hot" medium that requires audience participation. The cinema version of Gremlins 2: The New Batch had the film 'break down' because of gremlins in the projection booth, resulting in Hulk Hogan being called in from the cinema lobby to save the day.
The home video version had gremlins plague the viewer's TV set by switching it over to other channels. Eventually they come undone by switching over to a Western, at which point John Wayne shoots them. The characters in Spaceballs appear completely aware they are in a heavily merchandised Sci-Fi movie. At one point the bad guys rent a copy of the movie so they can fast forward and use that info to track down the good guys more quickly. Things become awkward when they reach the part of the movie they are in at that moment.
Blazing Saddles , an Affectionate Parody of western movies. Men in Tights "Hey, it worked in Blazing Saddles! Constant references to 'Things that, technically, didn't actually happen', many moments of fourth wall breaking, a scene that 'will probably be cut and will appear on the DVD Extras', and a scene highlighting all the cameos from the real musicians. In one of his asides to the camera, Steve Coogan's Tony Wilson describes himself as "being postmodern, before it was fashionable. Jorge Luis Borges practically invented the thing.
Detailed reviews of non-existent books. Several of his stories feature the motif of a mutable past because memory, its only vestige, is shifting. Early on in The Illuminatus! Trilogy , the narrator asks who he is and then says "oh, yes — I'm a book".
Join: Albert Einstein & you
Later in the series, some characters come to the conclusion that the events are taking place in a book. The super computer FUCKUP is first implied to be the author, but the characters disregard this "revelation" and conclude that the book they are in is outside their own universe.
School textbooks are this, especially English and Language Arts books. Paragraphs about paragraphs, sentences about sentences, topic sentences about topic sentences, and so forth.
Navigation menu
The City of Dreaming Books is narrated by the main character, who is a great fan of books and an aspiring writer himself, who constantly is addressing the readers with his musing on tropes and his own Genre Savviness , which isn't as high as one would expect. The novel is also a massive essay on the joy of reading books in general. In The Dark Tower series, one of the Big Bad 's plans is to send his minions to our world and attempt to kill Stephen King in order to prevent the last few books in the series from being written, thus ensuring that the Big Damn Heroes will never stop him from destroying the universe.
Metaphysically speaking, stopping the last books from being written would seem to qualify as destroying the universe, but it's not that PoMo. The katet's story happens no matter what happens to King. Killing him just means one of the two remaining lynchpins holding up the universe snaps in two, with appropriate results. In other words, he's not the god of the machine , he's the MacGuffin.
Danielewski's House of Leaves. Navidson accidentally escapes the labyrinth by burning a book he has titled Which has the exact same number of pages as the book you're reading. It's a book about a book about a documentary about a labyrinth; but simultaneously, the book IS the labyrinth. Within the documentary within the book within itself. The Thursday Next books embrace this to such an extent that it is the premise. Same for Barry Trotter parody novels by Michael Gerber. It's a parody which is actually a book about trying to stop a movie which turns out to be said movie which is actually revealed to be a parody of the movie written by the main character who has been watching a movie based loosely off his own life, which involved trying to stop the movie from being made.
There's even a disclaimer at the back from the author, claiming that if anyone has worked out what's going on that they are to let him know at once. At the end of the book I Am the Messenger by Marcus Zusak, when the main character, Ed, meets the person behind everything that's happened to him, it's strongly hinted that this person is in fact the author. He leaves behind a folder that turns out to contain the book's manuscript. Robert King's Rogues to Riches has this at moments.
In fact, it was how the heroes got past an orc dungeon guard. They convinced him they were in a book, and they would help him get a bigger role. The epilogue sees the orc still sitting patiently, waiting for them to fulfil their promise. Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five. The story constantly references other pieces of fiction in story. The first Chapter has the Author apologizing for how the book is written.
This is reasonably common in Vonnegut's works. Nabokov's Pale Fire definitely qualifies, with its mise en abyme , its unreliable narrator and its unconventional structure. The Number of the Beast and most of Robert A. Heinlein 's other later works involved the idea that any good enough piece of fiction caused a new universe to come into existence; its main characters visit Oz and other "fictional" worlds.
As far a literature in general goes, there is a trend of reincorporating genre structures and tropes into the style and depth of "literary fiction". Many writers are referring to this blurring of the established lines as the post-modernist movement in fiction, as literature and genre as we know it today is commonly attributed to the Modernist movement.
Every single Thomas Pynchon novel; it's basically its Creator Thumbprint. Catch , by Joseph Heller. The chapters themselves unfold non-linearly with existentialism as a heavy motif. The novel itself examines a fictional setting on the European front of World war 2, in particular highlighting the senselessness of the war in the form of absurdist black comedy. Tristram Shandy , like Shakespeare, has been described as early Post Modernism. Its Stream Of Consciousness style and digressions within digressions within digressions are the most noticeable aspects of this, but perhaps more important are instances of Painting the Medium like following the death of a character with a completely black page.
The fictionalized version of himself is named Horselover Fat "Philip" being Greek for "horse lover" and "Dick" being German for "fat" , and the book begins from Fat's perspective. Over time, however he begins to write in the first person including excerpts from his unpublished Exegesis. Eventually, Dick becomes the main character of the story and he interacts with his own fictionalized clone. You are the main character of If on a winter's night a traveler. The novel by Herman Melville is one big Mind Screw of social satire, religious symbolism and the author's own views, intertwined in a story that tests both the readers' and the characters' confidence in their morals.
The Princess Bride is about the relationship between the reader and the writer, and goes so far as to tell the reader to choose his or her preferred ending. It also has multiple layers of unreliable fictional authors, including a grossly fictionalized William Goldman , and the only thing everyone in all the layers of the book agree on is a triumph of Surrealism: October , in which the narrator regularly engages in pseudo-intellectual conversations with the reader, and several chapters are written in shaped poems.
Also, several events in the story exist only to cause confusion, and either don't actually happen, or are exaggerated by the narrator to sound better. At the beginning of the first novel of the trilogy, City of Glass , the main character receives a call from someone looking for a private detective named The main character later meets the character named Auster, but it is left unclear whether Auster is aware that he is the author.
The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien has been retro-actively called the first real "classic" of the genre, even though it was written in the s. An Elegy for the Still-living is in many ways a story about stories. The author interferes in the plot a couple times, and the characters show signs of awareness that they are fictional. The main character eventually finds a copy of the manuscript and freaks out.
He tries to fight doing what it says, but he can't help himself. Umberto Eco , one of postmodernism's leading theorists, writes page books such as The Name of the Rose , about scholars who spend their lives learning things from books and either go crazy or despair or both at trying to reconcile all these different grand narratives and the terrible things they lead other people to do. Everything written by Walter Moers. In Ensel and Krete the Author Avatar is constantly getting into rants about random topics. In the audiobook, there is a full two minute scene in which the narrator is only saying "brumli, brumli, brumli" , just to provide an example that as a prize-winning writer, he can write anything he wants.
Otherland by Tad Williams. Delany had always dabbled in blending Speculative Fiction with Post Modernism. In Dhalgren , he went so far into the postmodern world that he left many of his regular fans scratching their heads and wondering what happened. In addition to being thoroughly ambiguous as to genre if any , the work is an existential doorstopper that ends exactly where it started, and, along the way, branches into multiple lines of story, which are printed side-by-side down the page, for page after page, leaving it up to the reader to sort it all out in whatever order he may find convenient.
This is the title of this story, which is also found several times in the story itself by David Moser. It's Garry Shandling's Show had Garry and his friends aware that they were in a Sitcom , often talking directly to members of the audience, and manipulating the story to his own ends. Referenced by the Theme Song as well: This occasionally includes quibbling about changes in the script, and bitching about using up special effects money on Vince's hair.
Occasionally they'll pause mid-episode to reference these facts. Vince is fond of breaking the fourth wall with a wink or a grin, and an episode in Series 3 has Howard pause and address the camera directly to point out that the audience has already seen the events he's about to summarise. In several episodes of Quantum Leap , the main characters figure out what their objective for the episode is by eliminating the possibilities that would be "too easy" for a forty-five-minute drama series.
Also notable is that Sam interprets his situation as God himself intervening in the Quantum Leap project. Moonlighting attracted a lot of attention for its two main characters' constant awareness that they were in a television show, which allowed the typical detective drama setup to become quite far-fetched and goofy at times. The series ends with the show being cancelled and the set taken down.
Zack in Saved by the Bell could not only break the Fourth Wall but stop reality at will. This raises questions about the nature of Zack's existence. Is he a character, an actor, a first-person narrator, or He extended the point further years later by guesting on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon to promote "his" show Raising the Bar and explain why he used the stage name Mark-Paul Gosselaar. The classic Burns And Allen show, in which George Burns would talk directly to the audience about the ongoing events of the episode. In later episodes, George Burns would watch the television along with the home audience so that he also knew what was going on.
Stargate SG-1 is about as self-referential as you can get without breaking into parody territory This trope was a staple of Arrested Development. It's also a major staple of Community , the natural comedic successor to AD. Monty Python's Flying Circus frequently traded in this. The Kids in the Hall regularly broke the fourth wall, speaking directly to the audience and showing sets and props at the end or even during sketches.
The Kids would often introduce themselves as themselves. One sketch even involved a comedy writer In a fourth season episode, "The Monster at the End of This Book," the leads of Supernatural discover that someone has used visions of their lives as the inspiration for a series of horror novels. The books have the same titles as past episodes, and the writer's current manuscript is about what is happening to them right then.
The title being a reference to a very postmodern Sesame Street! This leads to a line that sums up the concept of the episode in a nutshell: The comedy folk song "The Anti-Singalong Song" relies on this trope to make it funny, as its performers cheerfully persuade their audience to sing about how they won't sing along. In the song "An Attempt to Tip the Scale" by Bright Eyes, Conor Oberst, in the middle of a fake interview in the song, at one point says, "Can you make that sound stop please?
The Beatles song "Only a Northern Song" references itself, telling how it was intentionally written badly. In the song "Signed Curtain" by Matching Mole a post-Soft Machine project which includes Robert Wyatt , the lyrics consist of references to song structure: This is the first verse.
- Post-Modernism - TV Tropes!
- Travels to the Sixth Dimension: A Journey Through Hyper-Space (The Voyager Series Book 1).
- From Paper to Pixels - Your Guide to the Digital Sheet Music Revolution!
Round the Horne would often stop in the middle of sketches and break down in to scripted verbal fights between the actors. Six Characters in Search of an Author is technically absurdist a movement that came between modernism and Post Modernism , but it provides early examples of many of the metafictional elements that became popular in Post Modernism. In the musical Into the Woods , the narrator is a character of his own.
Spamalot is positively brimming with this. Metal Gear Solid 2 , released in , among all of the things it attempted, is regarded as the first fully postmodern savaging of video games, sequels, and video game players. Attacking the consumers went over exactly as well as you'd expect , though it didn't quite succeed at its goal of getting people to stop liking the Metal Gear series. See this document for a full explanation of the game's postmodern subversion of genre conventions and player expectations.
See also this page for an explanation of the game's Mind Fuck of an ending, which included, among other things, telling both Raiden and the player that they are mindless puppets who do what they're told and "lack the qualifications to exercise free will. They're listed together because of the interestingly opposite points each game made on the subject. Bioshock 's point was "you're not a hero, you're a mindless drone doing what he's told", and the point of Portal was "maybe that's so, but you don't have to be".
The Acclaimed Flop Spec Ops: The Line certainly qualifies. It was marketed as your typical modern military shooter, and for the most part it acheived its Intended Audience Reaction by showing the unece ssary brutality the genre has had by subverting the general tropes involved in the genre , and deconstructing them.
Post-Modernism
Hyperdimension Neptunia , being a series of Moe versions of video game consoles as characters has everyone speaking directly to the player and making fun of their own personality quirks. Neptune is all about this. At one point the CPU's start playing a videogame with themselves as characters while they already are in a videogame.
Eternal Darkness won acclaim for itself by choosing to bypass the character and aim its scares directly at the player. It had fakeouts like making it appear that the magic spell you were casting misfired and your character died, or that your video feed had come loose in the middle of a battle, or that your Gamecube had reset, or that the game had decided to format your memory card — up to a decidedly non- Heroic BSoD — way scarier than any monster could possibly be.
Killer7 does this by removing your freedom of movement in a way that can be interpreted as done to point out the linearity and straightforwardness of the game, and how you can't control your fate. Because of a problematic control scheme, and the linearity itself and extreme Mind Screw in storyline, welcoming was mixed at best. Suda51 continues this trend in No More Heroes , a game that satirises Wide Open Sandbox games by giving you a huge open city to explore and then letting you realise that there's piss-all to do with your freedom save for storyline events that are unlocked in a very linear fashion.
And playing with your pet cat. Much like the previous examples, most people didn't appreciate the developers sacrificing gameplay just to prove a point, and the open world aspect was removed from the sequel. Also, both games are Suda ridiculing the player. See Travis Touchdown, the loser otaku who spends all his money on anime and fights rather than moving out of a hotel? This Loser Is You! The empty sandbox plays into that, as the only locations are a few nerdy stores and Travis' various jobs. Despite having a beautiful beach nearby. Nevertheless, many fans think he is awesome.
No doubt Suda finds this hilarious. An example is when a writer who wrote himself out of existence in his own stories, wrote into existence a childhood memory and MacGuffin of the main character The concept behind Omikron: The Nomad Soul was that the player's soul had been sucked into their computer and that they were able to directly inhabit the bodies of the characters they were controlling.
All of LucasArts ' adventures had the characters talking directly to the player and many would refer to their own artificiality. The Avatar, the Featureless Protagonist of the Ultima series from Ultima IV onward, was rather directly stated in Ultima IV and all games afterward to actually be the player himself, using his computer to journey from the "real world" to the realm of Brittania.
The Apple ][ game The Prisoner played with ideas of reality, just as the TV show it was based on did. At the start, the player is given a 3-figure number xyz, which they must not reveal to their enemies. At one point, the game will appear to crash with the error message "Syntax Error at line xyz". You're still in the game, and you just lost. The Infocom game Deadline , where you are a detective solving a murder, features a novelization of the game within the game. If you flick to the last page of the novel to find out how it ends, you find it ends with the detective shooting himself.
Disgusted with yourself for cheating, you pull out your gun and shoot yourself. The post- Legend of the golden witch tea party alone uses a combination of Animated Actors and Breaking the Fourth Wall to produce a powerful Mind Screw when the reader realizes that not only is this all canon , everything in the preceding novel was as well. And it just keeps getting more and more meta from there.
At a seemingly random moment during the story, the action in EarthBound is interrupted by a dialogue box asking the player in no uncertain terms to input their real, full name. Due to the way it's worded and the fact that it comes out of nowhere, players tend to, instead of inputting "FAGBALLS" like they usually would, comply fully. It isn't brought up again until the final boss fight, where the Big Bad Eldritch Abomination Giygas can only be defeated via a party member praying for help from every ally they met on their journey.
It works for a while, but then you start to get chilling messages about "your prayers being devoured by the darkness. After the apocalypse, all the characters specifically tell YOU that they're okay. Retro Game Challenge is a video game about the 8-bit era of video game history. Baten Kaitos by the same writer as Chrono Cross has the player take the role of a disembodied spirit who observes the main characters with their knowledge.
Sometimes they will even turn towards the screen and address the player , with a gap in the voiced dialogue where the player's name should go. Conker's Bad Fur Day revels in self-awareness. Conker knows the player and developers exists and interacts with them. Among other things, he references his future being crowned king from the opening cutscene and regularly lampshades the odder aspects of the game's structure such as the handy Context Sensitive Buttons. The Xbox remake Live and Reloaded even acknowledges a change to Conker's confrontation with the bridge gargoyle, designed to fool the players into believing the rest of the game has likewise been altered.
Sadly, the trope is also played for tragedy at the game's conclusion. A lockup saves Conker from becoming alien chow, and he bargains with the developers for a katana to slay the creature in exchange for keeping quiet about the Game-Breaking Bug. Unfortunately, he only realizes too late that he lost his chance to resurrect his murdered girlfriend. In Shadows of the Servants , your character is one of many who were summoned by a voodoo witch to investigate and break a troublesome curse.
At the end, it's revealed that the means by which she summoned up potential curse-breakers is the game itself. In Space Quest IV: Consensus on what constitutes an era can not be easily achieved while that era is still in its early stages. However, a common theme of current attempts to define post-postmodernism is emerging as one where faith, trust, dialogue, performance, and sincerity can work to transcend postmodern irony. The following definitions, which vary widely in depth, focus, and scope, are listed in the chronological order of their appearance.
In , the landscape architect and urban planner Tom Turner issued a book-length call for a post-postmodern turn in urban planning. In considering the names that might possibly be used to designate the new era following "postmodernism," one finds that the prefix "trans" stands out in a special way. The last third of the 20th century developed under the sign of "post," which signalled the demise of such concepts of modernity as "truth" and "objectivity," "soul" and "subjectivity," "utopia" and "ideality," "primary origin" and "originality," "sincerity" and "sentimentality.
As an example Epstein cites the work of the contemporary Russian poet Timur Kibirov. The term post-millennialism was introduced in by the American cultural theorist Eric Gans [18] to describe the era after postmodernism in ethical and socio-political terms. Gans associates postmodernism closely with "victimary thinking," which he defines as being based on a non-negotiable ethical opposition between perpetrators and victims arising out of the experience of Auschwitz and Hiroshima.
In Gans's view, the ethics of postmodernism is derived from identifying with the peripheral victim and disdaining the utopian center occupied by the perpetrator. Postmodernism in this sense is marked by a victimary politics that is productive in its opposition to modernist utopianism and totalitarianism but unproductive in its resentment of capitalism and liberal democracy, which he sees as the long-term agents of global reconciliation.
In contrast to postmodernism, post-millennialism is distinguished by the rejection of victimary thinking and a turn to "non-victimary dialogue" [19] that will "diminish […] the amount of resentment in the world. Pseudo-modernism's "typical intellectual states" are furthermore described as being " ignorance , fanaticism and anxiety " and it is said to produce a "trance-like state" in those participating in it. The net result of this media-induced shallowness and instantaneous participation in trivial events is a "silent autism" superseding "the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism.
How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure our Culture , Kirby developed further and nuanced his views on culture and textuality in the aftermath of postmodernism. In the cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker introduced the term metamodernism [24] as an intervention in the post-postmodernism debate. In their article 'Notes on metamodernism' they assert that the s are characterized by the emergence of a sensibility that oscillates between, and must be situated beyond, modern positions and postmodern strategies.
Postmodernism - Wikipedia
As examples of the metamodern sensibility Vermeulen and van den Akker cite the 'informed naivety', 'pragmatic idealism' and 'moderate fanaticism' of the various cultural responses to, among others, climate change, the financial crisis, and geo political instability. The prefix 'meta' here refers not to some reflective stance or repeated rumination, but to Plato's metaxy , which intends a movement between opposite poles as well as beyond. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The Total Art of Stalinism , Princeton: Princeton University Press, After the Great Divide. Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism.
Indiana University Press, , p. A Poetics of Postmodernism. Postmodern Fiction , London: A Report on Knowledge , Minneapolis: