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
minimalism in American fiction is "significantly different " (33) from what is meant by minimalism in visual arts. "The Hyper-Realist painter/sculptor has to possess every skill of his craft in order to be able to produce his art - his paraphernalia is rich again. The minimalist prose writer, on the other hand, is diminishing his own. The two extremes of using and neglecting devices still produce something very similar - worlds of neat, polished surfaces. This is how the two types of art can be associated." (35) The simingly similar shining surfaces differ-as described above-in the process of creation. The intoductory chapter in the first part of the book ends with a collection of attempted definitions of contemporary critics and a list of the names of the authors. This list ranges from James Atlas' early endeavor, "Less Is Less" in 1981, through Josef Jarab's (Czechoslovakia) "The Stories of the New Lost Generation" in 1988 to Utz Riese's (Germany) "Postmodern Negativity and Minimalism: The Realism of Raymond Carver" in 1990. What most of these definitions seem to be realizing in the works of the minimalists is that these stories are "deprived of epiphanies and revelations" (41) (James Atlas); they show the "belly-side" (41) of everyday life (Bill Buford). The lives of its characters are isolated from any community and the thinly narrow prose of the minimalists (42) could hardly bear the burden of the past or the future (Michael Gorra) therefore it is the literature of the Present. The "intentionally impoverished equipment" (42) of the minimalists is the consequence of an intentional turn away from the hysterically over-refined fictional worlds of the postmodern (Charles Newman) . Minimalists could find their way back to the reader who had been alienated by the postmodernists (43). Minimalism, especially after the second generation, is a kind of documentarist literature which is not depriving fiction from its own devices but is renewing and expanding its possibilities (Kim A. Herzinger) . It is a sheer "Life-style Fiction" (43) (Joe David Bellamy). The minimalist author "retains 186
