[4] Examples of master narratives can be found in U.S. high school textbooks according to scholar Derrick Alridge: "history courses and curricula are dominated by such heroic and celebratory master narratives as those portraying George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as the heroic 'Founding Fathers,' Abraham Lincoln as the 'Great Emancipator,' and Martin Luther King, Jr., as the messianic savior of African Americans.
[6] Although first used earlier in the 20th century, the term was brought into prominence by Jean-François Lyotard in 1979, with his claim that the postmodern was characterized precisely by mistrust of the "grand narratives" (such as ideas about Progress, Enlightenment, Emancipation, and Marxism) that had formed an essential part of modernity.
It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language ... Where, after the metanarratives, can legitimacy reside?Lyotard and other poststructuralist thinkers (like Michel Foucault)[10] view this as a broadly positive development.
[13] Borrowing from the works of Wittgenstein and his theory of the "models of discourse",[14] Lyotard constructs his vision of a progressive politics, grounded in the cohabitation of a whole range of diverse and always locally legitimated language-games; multiple narratives coexisting.
[16] The key concepts of Lyotard's thesis include: Postmodernists attempt to replace metanarratives by focusing on specific local contexts as well as on the diversity of human experience.
[23] Others have related metanarratives to masterplots, "recurrent skeletal stories, belonging to cultures and individuals that play a powerful role in questions of identity, values, and the understanding of life.