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.

society' ... turns towards the privacy of the individual and it produces an essentially different work of art

... the conclusion of postmodern philosophy results in a fundamentally different aesthetic reaction of the artist." (374) The self-referential worlds of the postmodernists are enveloped in fictionality, whereas the referential worlds of the minimalists are enveloped in a banal verisimilitude

(375). "... it is not language that disconnects from 'objective' reality, but it is the microcosm [of the individual] that detaches from the macrocosm [of the society] "(375). Minimalism "moves things from the foreground to the background" (377) in the postmodern picture. The appearence of the minimalist protagonist indicates the end of an era in literary history which diminished the role of the individual to 'less than zero', "we are on our way back to individualism, to a sovereign identity" (375), but the minimalist character is not yet fully prepared for this role. 4/ Before his final definition, and at other places throughout the book, Abádi Nagy warns us about single-sentence-definitions. Nevertheless, it is here where he attempts to condense his conclusions into a short paragraph. "Since postmoderism up to the present (1990), in the colorfully heterogeneous picture of American fiction, minimalism is the only new phenomenon which represents a group of writers who line up along a unified aesthetic aspiration. The name of the group derives from visual arts. This new style of prose writing on the aesthetic level of creation represents a break with postmodernism. But at the same time it retains many latent (primarily philosophical) premises of postmodernism. It turns away from the ironical, satirical tabulations of the world or the alternative worlds or the philosophical-deconstructionist language based experimentalism of the previous generation with a decision 197