The palimpsestic logic of postmodernism The postmodern paradigm implies a pluralistic and relativistic vision on canonicity and is based on the overlapping between the national and the international dimensions, or between world literature and national literature

The aim of this article is to assess the role of postmodern parody in the deconstruction and the reconfiguration of the literary canon. The canon is a concept and a heuristic metaphor which in Romania has started being discussed in a systematic manner only after 1989. The Romanian version of postmodernism is undoubtedly indebted to the Western model, but its promoters (writers of the ’80s, mainly), have managed to articulate an original poetics, even in the absence of the objective correlative of postmodernism, which is postmodernity (cf. Martin 1995: 3–13). Postmodernism is still a very controversial phenomenon and a much debated notion in Romanian critical discourse. However, nobody can deny that recent Romanian poetry has displayed an outstanding level of intertextual sophistication as well as a remarkable theoretical awareness. The representatives of the ’80s wrote a type of poetry which was coincident with (and sometimes critical of) recent developments in linguistics and semiotics (cf. Parpala-Afana 1994), thus conflating intertextuality with interdiscourse and metadiscourse. An important forerunner of their innovations was, as I am going to show, the poet Marin Sorescu (1936–1996). The scholarship regarding the canon and the problem of canonicity, decanonization and recanonization are overwhelming, and so is the literature dedicated to the other two issues involved, parody and postmodernism. Therefore, I will try to highlight the most important dimensions resulting from the interconnectedness of these concepts, as emerging from this particular corpus of Romanian poetry, with a focus on two volumes, by Marin Sorescu and Mircea Cărtărescu. Some of the findings may have a universal, transcultural value, while others are more culture-specific1 and are determined by a peculiar (re)contextualization of the literary movement called postmodernism.