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Illustrations and innovations - the
metonymic icons of the carnival site
Deborah Philips
Deborah Philips has published about the narratives of television, carnival and postwar
fiction and has a particular research interest in the conventions and structures
of the stories present in popular culture and in everyday life. She has previously
developed Creative Writing Groups in a psychiatric hospital and has written about
the therapeutic potential of writing in a mental health context. Deborah also has a
background in journalism and publishing, as a writer and as an editor of Women’s
Review. Her recent relevant publications include: Writing Well: Creative Writing and
Mental Health (with Debra Penman and Liz Linnington); Brave New Causes (with
Ian Haywood); and Writing Romance: Women’s Fiction 1945-2005.
d.philips@brighton.ac.uk
The contemporary theme park has been read as the embodiment of the
postmodern site; the use of collage, the juxtaposition of narratives and images
without respect for the boundaries of history and geography is frequently invoked
as the abiding feature of post-modernity. For Jameson, “Disneyfication” is “another
word for postmodernity and its simulacra” (JAMESON, 2005, p. 215) 1 . However, the
cheerful borrowing and reproduction of “inherited” narratives and cultural images,
which Jameson identifies as defining “postmodernity (or late capitalism)”, may not
be exclusively a postmodern phenomenon. While new reproductive technologies
and a global culture have certainly broadened the speed and range of a shared
cultural iconography, the repeated reproduction of familiar stories and images is
not a postmodern or even a modern phenomenon, but a process that dates back
to the beginnings of the reproduction of visual culture.
There has long been a borrowing and circulation of defining cultural icons that
1 See BRYMAN (1995) for an account of the number of postmodern critics who have concerned themselves with
the Disney parks.
Cadernos de Estudos Avançados em Design - design e humanismo - 2013 - p. 89-104
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