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.

"Problems of Meaning", "Plot and Secondary Narrative Structure", "Minimalist Characterization", "Narrator and Perspective", 'Time and Space in Minimalist Fiction", "The Imagery of Minimalist Fiction". The ninety-page-chapter incorporates the theoretical hard core of the book. Even a list of Abádi Nagy's own terms coined and used here would exceed the limits of a short overview like the present piece. (It is here that Abádi Nagy's reader might well be puzzled most: why has this book been published in Hungarian? Interested readers could probably read it in English, too, and the author could have saved a lot of his energies by leaving the task of the translation of the whole book to a translator.) Abádi Nagy confesses his creed as a critic in "Theory and Method." By accepting Wayne C. Booth's theoretical pluralism he rejects theoretical monism and throughout the chapter (the whole book, too) the author lets "minimalism speak for itself "(282), rather than choose the terminology of one or another critical school and demonstrate how one can force "minimalism to illustrate one or another critical theory" (282). 3/ The chapter, "The Relationship Between Minimalism and Postmodernism," poses the question that somehow, understandably though, penetrates the whole book. "Is minimalism inside the still flexible boundaries of the postmodern, or is it distinctively beyond them?" Abádi Nagy's answers are like concentric circles on the surface of a pond: each circle indicates that the pebble is deeper down in the water. "... our short answer is this: minimalism has some of its characteristics in common with postmodernism while some other characteristics make it completely different from postmodernism" (365). The second attempted answer goes like this: "American minimalist fiction is a different aesthetic response to the same postmodern awareness of the World" (365). There is no sense in further simplifying our answer, the author admits, and sets out collecting similarities and dissimilarities. 194 ZAO