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
Terms üke "K-Mart Realism", "Designer Realism", "High Tech Realism", etc. differ only slightly from the group above. They are right in the sense "that is to say: the world of minimalist fiction is equipped with objects available in K-Marts and is peopled by the customers of KMarts"(28). "Designer Realism," on the other hand, has another relevant, if latent, aspect "that might emphasize the fact that minimalists focus on and accentuate the surface level of reality" (28). Whereas "High Tech Fiction" might have a double connotation: "1/ a type of fiction that deals with people living in the world of High Technology; 2/ fiction of High Technology, a fiction that can tell us a lot by showing a few things only" (28). A third group of labels indicate a sociological bias: ''White Trash Fiction", "Postliterate Literature", "hick chic" and others of this type demonstrate that their inventors found the people in these stories and novels most often come from an easily definable segment of American society: "Minimalist fiction is the literary record of the sociology of the poor, the drifters, the criminals .... of industrial suburbs and small country towns, the workers and lower-middle-class (or very rarely middle-middle class) citizens of America" (262). However complete this sociological reading of minimalism seems to be, it is not the sociological aspect of this fiction that remarkably distinguishes it. A brief section following the description of the abundance of the recently coined new terms, is devoted to a short overview of the history of the term (minimalism) in music and visual arts. Abádi Nagy, when comparing minimalist music to minimalist fiction, points out that "short phrases and slow motion is a characteristic of minimalist fiction, as well" (30). He concludes, however, that the term (minimalism) in music does not offer a key to understanding the same term in fiction. The same critical term in visual arts offers more. The author proves that the term itself, as it is used in literary criticism, "is entering the critical paraphernalia from the direction of visual arts" (33). Although both visual artists and fiction writers of the minimalist style turn to the surface level of reality and would prefer "taking objects directly from everyday reality" (32) into their world, the author reminds us that 185
