The article discusses popular culture in the context of two terms: prefiguration and postfiguration, showing that the latter is the proper tool to describe flow of topics and images in popular literature and other fields, e.g. film or music. The authoress discusses popular culture as looking at the same time forward - in search of new elements to capture the audience - and back - reflecting its own genres, formulas and themes. The term postfiguration is proposed as a unifying category for these two, apparently contradictory tendencies.