Madonna, American Pie (2000) vs. Lana Del Ray, National Anthem (2012)

Other terms related to pastiche and parody - and likewise used sometimes interchangeably and sometimes variably by different critics - are satire and irony. A safe distinction between them is that whereas satire generally is a playful imitation with a moral purpose, irony is often used by agents who cannot decide on morals or on a metaphysic fundament of the world (as happened with romantic irony, where speakers both believed and disbelieved what they said). Postmodernist irony is arguably more extreme. According to Lisa Coletta (see article on "Political Satire and Postmodernist Irony" in your volume). Postmodernist irony, reflecting a pervasive awareness or unreality (or reality and history as construction) replaces meaning with the appearance of meaning - i. e., the world is incoherent, we are in with the joke, but we cannot break from it. This practice frequently entails anachronism, which, despite Linda Hutcheon's optimism, runs the risk of de-historicizing the past (or, on the contrary, does it show it as not such an idyllic / mythic place anyway?)