méta-récit
An overarching story or philosophy claiming to unify and make sense of everything; postmodernity is defined by disbelief in any such story.
In lecture order, as Marci Shore presents each view. The time opens that minute of the lecture on YouTube.
For Shore, Marxism symbolically died as a passionately held worldview when Warsaw Pact tanks ended Prague's socialism with a human face in 1968; that post-structuralism took off just then is, she says, no coincidence.
Put simply Shore: Marxism symbolically died as a passionate belief in 1968, when Soviet-bloc tanks crushed Prague's experiment in a humane socialism. That post-structuralism took off just then is, she says, no coincidence.
The postmodern, in Lyotard's famous 1979 formula, is "incredulity toward meta-narratives": a refusal to believe any single grand story could gather everything up and make it cohere.
Shore offers a simplified schema: once Marxism and the grand narratives die, Eastern and Western Europe answer that death in two distinct ways, which sometimes overlap or interact.
Put simply Shore's simplified picture: once Marxism and the other all-explaining stories died, Eastern and Western Europe responded in two different ways, which sometimes overlapped or influenced each other.
Links from these claims to others in the course. Each shows the earlier claim, then the later one that answers it. “Our inference” marks a link Shore does not state outright.
HegelHegel's slogan "the true is the whole" means everything is interdependent and intelligible only together; since a totality shows itself only from its end, meaning arrives in retrospect. L4 · 46:56
LyotardThe postmodern, in Lyotard's famous 1979 formula, is "incredulity toward meta-narratives": a refusal to believe any single grand story could gather everything up and make it cohere. L22 · 17:41
Incredulity toward any grand story claiming to hold the whole togetherOur inference
Throughlines that pass through one of these claims.
Terms that appear in the same claims.