Tuesday 1 February 2011

Claude Levi Strauss - Genre

Claude Levi Strauss - Genre

You'll remember Levi Strauss from AS and his theory of 'binary opposites', he also however developed the theory of 'bricolage'. Bricolage is a processes by which traditional objects or language are given a new, often subversive, meaning and context.


The most obvious example was the use of a safety pin by punks as a piercing. Strauss believed that texts were constructed from the debris of other texts, this meant that all texts used 'signs' or elements from other texts in order to create something new. That DOESN'T make it postmodern however. A text become postmodern when it deliberately takes elements from outside it's 'genre' and makes you notice them (like the safety pin piercing).

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