Stories employed to legitimate the mechanisms of social control. Thus, for example, when parents tell their children, "We only want to help you avoid our mistakes," they are constructing a metanarrative that justifies the imposition of rules of conduct they are unwilling to follow themselves. Lyotard supposed that the deliberate subversion of prominent metanarratives is a significant tool of postmodernism. Recommended Reading: Jean-Francois Lyotard, Postmodern Fables, tr. by Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minnesota, 1999) and Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, tr. by Brian Massumi (Minnesota, 1985).1
- Definition of metanarrative. http://www.swif.uniba.it/lei/foldop/foldoc.cgi?metanarrative [↩]