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.

But, as Abádi Nagy emphasizes, "due to the phenomenological approach of the writer, relevant pieces of information might as well be missing. And this is not a consequence of the inarticulate quality of the character" (238). Abádi Nagy repeatedly states that the above types of the minimalised self most often appear in an entanglement with each other in the actual context of the individual works. There are no protagonists (or just very rarely) who are the sheer representatives of one or another from among the four types above. This categorization is still relevant, for one of these types is usually dominant in most characters and they help us in understanding how the aesthetic strategies of the minimalist author work. From among the possible strategies of survival for the character with reduced self, Abádi Nagy names two: "disengagement" (from society) and "apathetic survival". What he calls "disengagement" is not new in literature. For Joyce and the moderns the world was alienating, their characters were either paralyzed or they escaped society and developed a set of different values. For the postmodernist writer the world is a chaos that cannot be defined or escaped (238). What the minimalist writer preserves from the postmodern is its world-as-chaosfeeling, but the author "turning back towards realism/modernism places the character from the absurd world of the postmodern back into a recognizable reality. Though, unlike modernism, the minimalist writer

—indicating a distrust similar to that of the postmodernists

—excludes society as responsible for social problems, does not set his/her characters into a community" (238—239). The minimal self s strategies are validated only in the private, shrunken world of the individual

(240). 'The traumatized, paralyzed, dissatisfied minimal self who is charged with frustration, disappointment, alienation, who is disturbed and contemplative, most typically disconnects society" (239). It does not mean that the protagonist is m