Pastiche

Book excerpt: Pastiche Cultural Memory in Art, Film, Literature Ingeborg Hoesterey Traces the rise of the pastiche in the arts and popular culture. In the last two decades cultural theorists and artists have redefined a genre of artistic expression that for centuries was regarded as both elusive and notorious: the pastiche, or pasticcio. Today, highly engaging manifestations of the genre minor can be found in architecture, painting, and mixed media installations; in film, literature, and performance modes ranging from the operatic to rock event; and in supposedly trivial discourses such as advertising. Postmodern pastiche is about cultural memory as a history of seeing and writing. One of the markers that sets aesthetic postmodernism apart from modernism is artistic practice that borrows ostentatiously from the archive of Western culture, which modernism, in its search for the unperformed, tended to dismiss. Contemporary artists are re-examining traditions that modernism eclipsed in its pursuit of the "Shock of the New" or--in the case of architects--the functionalism of the International style. Ingeborg Hoesterey, Professor of Comparative Literature and Germanic Studies at Indiana University, is author of Verschlungene Schriftzeichen: Intertextualität von Literatur und Kunst in der Moderne/Postmoderne; editor of Zeitgeist in Babel: The Postmodernist Controversy; and co-editor of Intertextuality: German Literature and Visual Art from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century and Neverending Stories: Toward a Critical Narratology. March 2001 160 pages, 20 b&w photos, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 cloth 0-253-33880-8 $45.95 L / £34.00 paper 0-253-21445-9 $19.95 s / £15.50 Contents A Discourse History of Pasticcio and Pastiche Pastiche in the Visual Arts Cinematic Pastiche Literary Pastiche Pastiche Culture beyond High and Low: Advertising Narratives, MTV, Performance Styles Coda