Ph.D. Anca-Narcisa Leizeriuc Faculty of Letters “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iasi

This paper seeks to determine: * Whether the postmodern phenomenon, in generally, appears as a continuation of modernity or as a crash of level. * How the epistemic changes affect the human being as it can be seen in literature. * If the postmodernism has its legitimacy in the Romanian space since the third wave of post- industrial civilization is absent here.

* Starting from postmodern theorists studies (Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucauld, Alvin Toffler) there were synthesized the epistemic changes. * An applied study on the cultural dimension of existence, namely the Romanian literature, highlights how postmodernism appear in this space.

* Is a cultural and social phenomenon, generated by the epistemic depth categories (Foucauld, 1992). * The third wave of the post-industrial civilization affects the “infosphere” level (Toffler, 1983). * The new epistemic model of knowledge is the pluralism (with his relativism and fragmentary ) and refuses any discourse of legitimacy.

* The text is seen as a fragment of a universal text. * The literature uses the media, the internet, and the virtual book; therefore the art infuses in the social body and serves the common taste. * The function of art is reconsidered: it is no longer the education, but only the textual pleasure.

* The substance and the main subject of the literary creation are the meaningless of existence and the vacuum. * Without rejecting the tradition, the postmodernism is accepting a peaceful coexistence with the tradition, treated with irony or a parody spirit.

* The death of art or its silence means in postmodern literature: (a) the negative echo of language, autodestructive, nihilist; (b) its positive stillness, self-transcendent, sacramental, plenary (Hassan, 1971).

* There is no metaphysical truth but a multitude of points of view. * As a prisoner of the reality, the human being has no longer the possibility to dream at his ideals or to communicate with the transcendent.

* The existentialism and the nihilism are leading to the alienation of being seen as "a floating entity” (C ă rt ă rescu, 1999). * A show of anatomical metaphors and visceral fantasy, where the eye is the essential organ takes place.

* The split between postmodernism and modernism seems to be a literary continuity. * The new humanism of postmodernism captures human alienation, the anonymous individuals depending on the real world and even the robotization of human being. * The Romanian literary postmodernism has emerged not as a phenomenon of imitation in relation to Anglo- American postmodernism, but as an organic evolution of Romanian Literature.

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