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.

antisocial, it means that s/he is dissociable (240). S/he is not leaving the community as a demonstration (moderism), s/he is just not joining it. "Minimalism, however, is not a pragmatic literature, it is more concerned about recording the present situation: when the personality is dissolved in crime or in narcosis or in an automatized sex of sensuous lust" (242). When Abádi Nagy discusses his category of the "apathetic survival," we are anticipating some of his conclusions at the end of his book. 'The apathy of the minimalist character is not an indication of the insensitivity of the minimalist writer to the negative aspects of reality" (244). The excluded social arena and the apathy of the character are an indication of "skepticism, simply a different, new answer to the same epistemological dilemma of the postmodern. (Skepticism makes minimalism akin to postmodern.) "(244) No matter how much the "privatized" world of the minimalist protagonist is devoid of society as such, "social effects in an indirect way do infiltrate into the life of the minimalist protagonist" (244). That is to say: "society in minimalist fiction is necessarily and exclusively the American society" (251). What do we learn about American society from minimalist fiction? "American minimalist fiction ... is indicating what is happening in America in the period: the American man of the street is losing his interest in politics" (254). As Abádi Nagy points out, "the political man of radical social change in the US in the 1960s withdraws to a subcommunal level of his privatized world by the 1970s and 1980s" (253). The reasons for this change are more than telling: "The average American citizen turns away from society. Partly as a consequence of the results of the former movements (the Civil Rights Movement, the end of the Vietnam War); partly disillusioned and started back by the unexpected results (drug consumption as an inheritance of the subcultures of the sixties, AIDS following the sexual revolution) or fed up by the political assasinations of the sixties, by the Watergate case at the beginning of the seventies and then the hostages in Iran (both caused the fall of a president each)... partly because 2Pf