A good starting point, taken from www.tes.co.uk:

'I don't know if there is a postmodernity. In English studies there is postmodernism, and there are millions of ways in which to define that, or in which to deny its existence. To me, it represents a change of attitude which seems to have taken effect from round about the middle of the twentieth century. There's the idea of the death of the author. This says that previously the author was God, and you suspended your belief, entered into the world of the story and did not question the narrator - well, most of the time, anyway. Then the audience started to think for itself and question things, and interpret stories according to its culture. There's the idea of deconstruction, in which, for example, previously-accepted stereotypes and their moral implications are undone - e.g. Uriah Heep (Dickens), Slim (Steinbeck) and Dr No (Fleming) have their gay stereotype employed to imply evil intentions. This one goes right back to the Summoner (Chaucer). The deconstruction bit is the audience's awareness of the process of stereotyping and its use to imply morality and otherwise: that audience-awareness undoes the malign effect and, one hopes, makes the literature more honest. There's the idea of the storyline being undone. Stories no longer need a beginning, middle and end, or a plot. They can be driven by some other aspect, such as collage, or they can be circular or partial or anything you like. There's the idea of characterisation being undone. In Victorian novels, for example, characters tended to represent moral aspects - a direct descendant of the medieval morality plays. Now they often have no moral aspect, and of course the anti-hero can be totally anti and no-one minds much. There's the neo-historicist approach, which tries to understand any piece of writing in the context in which it was written - an impossible ideal, because we can't help imposing our own concepts on history. There's the idea of mutual influence, in which past and present culture and politics influences art, and art influences contemporary and future culture and politics, and all art influences all other art, and everything is seen in the context of everything else. For example, Jane Eyre inspired the prequel about mad Mrs Rochester, The Far Sargasso Sea, which in turn can affect our interpretation of Jane Eyre when we re-read it, because Mrs R has now been given a voice.' (Perhaps relate to Harold Bloom's idea of 'The Anxiety of Influence'.)

Choose a film like Run Lola Run and use textual analysis to see how many of these ideas apply..

Patrick Philips identifies these main feature of postmodernism:

INTERTEXTUALITY

HYBRIDITY

PLAYFULNESS

SIGNIFICATION

IRONY

Do they apply to Run Lola Run?

Run Lola Run and postmodernism

Run Lola Run and Philosophy

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