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.

To begin with Abádi Nagy refers to Zavarzadeh's argument (The Mythopoetic Reality) saying that postmodernism finds it impossible to totalize the world. "It is enough to think of the terrains of reality that the subcommunal focus of the minimalists exclude to admit that minimalists have the same feeling of fragmentation as the postmodernists"

(366). Causality and the fragmentation of causality is a key issue here for "the problems of causality of the postmodern survive in minimalism"

(367). The approach of the writer "might hide the cause (eg. Mclnerney) or the interrelationship between cause and effect" (367). As a consequence of this feeling of fragmentation and confused causation, there is an "indifference for ideologies" (367) in the postmodern, while minimalism "simply ignores ideologies" (367). It is another common feature of the two that "both elaborate surfaces" (368). Hidden metafictionality is another latent element that ties minimalism to postmodernism despite the fact that "apart from some fragments of metafictionality, we cannot find short stories or novels that are entirely metafictional"(369) among minimalist works. Abádi Nagy quotes John Barth and Joe David Bellamy as the representatives of a group of critics who believe that discontinuity is stronger between minimalism and postmodernism than continuity. According to Barth minimalism is a revolt against "thick", "baroquelike" fiction of the postmodern (369). Bellamy's conclusion is very similar but he compares the minimalist revolt against the postmodern to John Gardner's revolt against the same in his On Moral Fiction. The debate launched by Gardner's book might have had an impact on minimalists who then "might have sensed a 'moral vacuum'"

(371). (In connection with Raymond Carver's moral inclinations, for example, Abádi Nagy comments that "he was bound to make the minimalist turn" as he was brought up in a family which had to face "profound problems of survival" (371), he was surrounded by people whose lives were flooded by everyday problems, who were veiy far away from sophisticated obsessions of the postmodernists. "Postmodernism stripped moments of everyday existence from the dilemma of philosophy ... and placed the stress on philosophy itself. Minimalism on