culture, subculture and counterculture - Facultatea de Litere

SIMONA ANTOFI
critics may relate this ‘pilgrimage’ (the term is used by Ezra Pound in his
Cantos) among concepts to Jacques Derrida’s grammatology viewed as a
principle of articulating the text. Focused on as „un spaţiu caracterizat nu atât
prin identitatea sau diferenţierea sa spaţială, cât prin diferenţierea sa temporală
faţă de sine” 5 , the latter establishes specific relations with its own historicity, to
be more specific, with „dimensiunea temporală a propriului război civil purtat cu
sine însuşi” 6 . (Connor 1999: 32) That fact that the critical discourse/ text is here
under discussion will not change in the least the problematic nature of the issue:
emerging by casual, selective differentiation from the former phenomenon, i.e.
modernism, postmodernism and its metadiscourse are doomed to terminological
ambiguity.
Furthermore, another aspect should also be taken into consideration. If the
literary discourse is intended to be a critical discourse too (and vice versa), it may
not be so difficult to understand why a new concept, that of critifiction, has been
coined and frequently made use of, along with other concepts like “new
authenticity”, “biographism”, etc., by the Romanian theorists of postmodernism in
literature. „Conştiinţa critică încorporată în text” 7 , praised by Ion Bogdan Lefter
(1986: 38-152) (one of the most fervent promoters of Romanian postmodernism)
and violently denied by Ciprian Şiulea (2003), might account, on the one hand,
for the recuperation and revival of the existing cultural heritage, and, on the
other hand, for the conscious manipulation of the text production, of the “mise
en scène” and of the literary artifice of any kind. Therefore, the realism of
postmodern writing results both from the writer’s conscious – but, of course,
fictionalized – presence on the text level, and from the illusion of transposing,
within the same text, the writer’s emotions.
Uncomfortable with the status of a postmodernist critic, Alexandru
Muşina introduces and defines a new concept, that of new anthropocentrism,
which is partially related to that of biographism. He also defines postmodern
authenticity in the following terms: „Poeţii redescoperă valoarea propriei
biografii, a micilor întâmplări cotidiene, a sentimentelor nesofisticate, a
senzaţiilor nemediate, a privirii directe. Privirea trebuie să fie obiectivă, în
sensul că între ea şi realitate nu trebuie să se interpună limitele diverselor
mitologii, clişee culturale etc. Aceasta îi conferă un plus de claritate, de
autenticitate. În acelaşi timp, poezia devine mai personală, creşte angajarea
existenţială vizavi de propriul text. Mai modestă totodată, mai puţin supra sau
para umană, mai puţin mitică şi mai mult cotidiană se vrea această poezie.” 8 (in
Crăciun 1999: 146) The postmodern poet’s direct involvement with reality tends
to replace the influence of the cultural heritage to which, as a creator, he feels
subjected more than anybody else. Rendered democratic and entirely secular, the
poet’s perspective should cease to be visionary, it should represent/ be subsumed
to reality – by means of autobiography – which means that literary instruments
may change, or the writers may try to change them; thus the postmodern revision
of reality or literature may lead but to another kind of convention, that is to
another set of procedures and techniques theorized and claimed as such.
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