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 - Attila Kőszeghy: "New-Dirty-Postliterature-Pop-Lo-Cal-K-Mart". On American Minimalist Fiction in the 1970s and 1980s. (Abádi Nagy Zoltán: Az amerikai minimalista próza. Budapest: Argumentum Kiadó, 1994.
these movements had exhausted, partly because a new conservative era was just starting and partly because the oil crisis of the mid-seventies resulted in an economic recession, as well." (254) As a result of the traumas listed above, the average American man "would not pay attention great social problems are discussed" (255). Abádi Nagy quotes Jayne Anne Phillips' opinion saying "the American Government and political system, unlike the European ones, isolate their citizen more from politics" (254). If political man is missing, what is there left from America in minimalist fiction? "We have everything here ... that American everyday life produces on minimal-communitylevel which this style of writing is focussed on ... everything that can be felt by the minimalist hero" (255). History, also, is absent from minimalist fiction but in a different way because it can never be "entirely excluded from it" (255). But the need 'to switch off history is coming from the greatest social trauma of post-WW II America:"It is the memory of the Vietnam War that leads to the absence of history" (255). Concerning the sociological background to American minimalist fiction, the author poses the following question: Is there a cultural code to American Minimalism? Abádi Nagy uses A. C. Zijerveld's The Abstract Society to explain the "one-dimensional" world of minimalism. "Postmodern fiction reacted to 'abstract society' with visions of surrealistic machinery... Minimalism, on the other hand, ... moves closer to the individual, to the family ... proceeds to a subcommunity level" (261). The next question is whether individuals in minimalist literature still behave "as social creatures" (261). Abádi Nagy's answer is that "in this prose of quotidian experience the great patterns of social-psychology, the great questions of American society are present in a latent form" (261). 2/ The chapter devoted to the "Formal Characteristics of Minimalist Fiction" contains the following subchapters: 'Theory and Method", 193 2Pf
