Changing the canon means shocking the receivers' expectations,

implying a spectacular alteration in content and form, a

contradiction of the public's horizon of expectation. On the other

hand, it is clear that a new canon is imposed by means of the

more or less implicit complicity of the receivers of a certain epoch.

Thus, there are literary epochs reticent to new, just as are epochs

opened to change, to novel attempts. The canon cannot be

perceived as an abstract entity or as a notion depicted from the

particular aesthetic reality and from a certain context. It is not a

type of immutable pattern, like the Platonic ideas, with no

connection to the real world, to the individual work, with the

climate of the literary-artistic epoch. On the contrary, the

aesthetic canon becomes alive in a particular socio-cultural frame,

in an aesthetic environment that imprints its conformation,

which determines it stringently.

The canon of a certain historical instance is situated on the

border between tradition and innovation, trying to fuel the

significant energies with the precedent aesthetic canon and with

the attempt to overcome it. Undoubtedly, the change in canon is

every time preceded by a crisis. In that moment in which

literature does not offer viable aesthetic solutions, in that moment

in which expression is no longer self-sufficient, it does not answer

efficiently to its primordial destiny, a certain clash occurs, a

crisis, on the world vision level and on the artistic form level. The

change in canon may appear to be - and sometimes it really is -

a way to adapt literature to the context, to a new sensitivity, to

the flow and dynamics of life.

Iulian Boldea