pastiche

is the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language.

Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter' (Postmodernism 17). In postmodern pastiche, by contrast, 'Modernist styles. . . become postmodernist codes' (Postmodernism 17), leaving us with nothing but 'a field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a norm' (Postmodernism 17). Postmodern cultural productions therefore amount to 'the cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion, and in general what Henri Lefebvre has called the increasing primacy of the 'neo'' (Postmodernism 18). In such a world of pastiche, we lose our connection to history, which gets turned into a series of styles and superceded genres, or simulacra: 'The new spatial logic of the simulacrum can now be expected to have a momentous effect on what used to be historical time' (Postmodernism 18). In such a situation, 'the past as 'referent' finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts' (Postmodernism 18). We can no longer understand the past except as a repository of genres, styles, and codes ready for commodification.

pastiche, n.Definitions

pastiche