The term grand narrative or in other
The term grand narrative or in otherwords, the “metanarrative”, which when you derive the word itself, it basicallymeans a complex idea formed by the concept of “story telling”, so a story,inside a story, that explains the philosophical aspects of knowledge and historicalunderstanding. It is a global narrative theory of the historical experience, whichcompletes an aspect of a proficient idea. These narratives vary from the notionof religion to the emergence of the modern era to the criticism and critiquesof the perspective of the post-modern world. The expression of the “Grand Narratives” was first established by the French philosopher,”Jean- Francois Lyotard” in (1979), where he theorized the term “post-modern”by looking at different scopes of views and establishing a form of knowledgefrom it. In his famous, well known book “ThePostmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge”, which wasalso published in (1979).
Lyotard argues that we need to see the world In termsof a “perforation of micro-narratives”. He was driven entirely by theeconomic logic. He was also looking at the “rejection of the grand narratives”,because to him that’s what the postmodernism era was about. Postmodernism hadthis ideology of getting away from the constraints of modernism, and to followdifferent paths and connect them to the local culture. One of the main concepts that Lyotardkeeps mentioning in his book is the “death of thegrand narrative”, how in the postindustrial society “thegrand narrative is dead”. That is because to him “The People” decide what Isneeded to determine the legitimacy of the truth.
A particular historical period thataffected our belief about the idea of the “Grand narrative” disappearing,occurred in (1966) which is when post-modernism started. It officially started when the” PruittIgoe Scheme (1954)” got blown up in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 15,1972 at3:32 pm. After it was demolished bydynamite, new projects started to ascend, turning the slum buildings into newastonishing flats, that’s also where architect “Minoru Yamasaki” designed the well-known”World Trade Centre”. A key feature that postmodernism likes to see is the “eradication” of the thing that went before (creatingan image of destroying the thing that proceeds it).
It’s the stage where the transcendenceof “metanarratives” took over the “micronarratives”. It’s the phase where wemove from modernism to postmodernism, how “modernism” was mostly recognized as a style, a kind of concept of the view of theworld. Whereas in “postmodernism” it was taken in a much more deeper concern to develop architecturewithin the different cultures that we are surrounded with. The idea of irony isalso repeatedly being conveyed in postmodernism.
