Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. [Vol. 3.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 23)

BOOK REVIEWS - Csaba Czeglédi: Endre Vázsonyi: Túl a Kacegárdán, Culmet-vidéki amerikai magyar szótár [Beyond Castle Garden: An American Hungarian Dictionary of the Calumet Region]. Edited and introduction by Miklós Kontra. A Magyarország-kutatás könyv-tára XV. Budapest: Teleki László Alapítvány, 1995. 242 pp

"American Minimalist Fiction: Authors and Works" The first part opens with a preliminary chapter on minimalism. This chapter is, almost apologetically, devoted to the critical helterskelter around the phenomenon. "Minimalism in American literature is the phenomenon of the 1970s and 1980s. It makes its first appearance in the late sixties. Its main representatives, Raymond Carver and Ann Beattie, had already had a marked influence on a younger generation in the seventies. In the eighties minimalism became the strongest hue registered by critics"

1 (21). The reason for the apologetic tone of the introductory chapter is that the term itself has not yet "settled" in American literary criticism. "Many critics had tried to label this new phenomenon in many different ways before they tolerated, rather than generally accepted, the term 'minimalism'

" (25). Many, more or less witty, labels are collected from various critics' articles, and the author defends his own choice (minimalism)

. " 'Dirty Realism' reminds him of the realism of the 'muck-rakers' at the turn of this century" (27). "The vague and insipid 'New Realism' is a term without critical judgement. Critics who use it either speak about the return to Realism or about the 'renewal' of Realism when they talk about minimalism" (27). "The inventor of the term 'Pop Realism' might have born in mind the fact that minimalist writers use the products of the American pop culture and consumerism in their stories and novels so often... and the very layer of society whose days are flooded by these products" (27). Labels like "TV Fiction", "Coke Fiction", "Diet-Pepsi minimalism", "Lo-Cal Fiction", "Freeze-Dried Fiction" among others miss their target by being satirical as if the authors of this type of fiction were also satirical about their characters, whereas they "highlight these objects, facts, occupations simply because these things master their characters' lives, and not (or very rarely) because they want to be satirical about their own characters or want to ridicule them" (27). 1 Abádi Nagy Zoltán, Az amerikai minimalista próza (Budapest: Argumentum Kiadó, 1994) 21. [quotations from this edition hereafter will be bracketed (

)in the text] 184