Meaning (existential)

Mathematics

History

Literature

Statistics

Epistemology

Nothing

Philosophy

Narrative

Minimalism (technical communication)

Criticism

Studies in short fiction

new type of short story peopled, according to many critics, with motiveless characters involved in meaningless actions, began to appear in American publications, notably the New Yorker, in the 1970s and by 1985 had, some of the same critics said, taken over the market. ... Fiction has, in the past few years, fallen into null holding pattern with what has been called null ..., Robert Dunn wrote in 1985 (After Minimalism 53). The null fad, Madison Smartt Bell said in 1989, was so dominant null nothing else could get through into the light (Koch et al., 61). Minimalist stories were denounced in scholarly journals, literary magazines, and the New York Times Book Review. The null story, Carol Iannone said, was a grimly logical demonstration project for the `deconstruction' of literature's pretensions to meaning and range, of its claim to speak null higher and subtler language than that available in popular culture of everyday life (61); its narrator, according to Charles Newman, was dragged down by his characters, adopting their limitations and defects (25); its narrative voice, Grace Paley was quoted by Bell as saying, didn't come from anywhere (Koch et al. 47). Although references to minimalism, generally negative, continue in current short fiction criticism, as in Jon Powell's 1994 article which equates null with dehumanization (651), much uncertainty appears to remain as to exactly what the null short story is: who--beyond Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, and one of the Barthelmes--the null writers are or were, and where they were published; when the null short story was prevalent; and whether in fact it prevailed at all, at any time. As of this writing, for example, the most recent edition of Holman and Harmon's Handbook to Literature does not define the word, nor do two thick anthologies of short stories, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction (5th ed.) and Fiction 100 (7th ed.); the glossary in another anthology, The Story and Its Writer, at least makes the attempt, A literary style exemplifying economy and restraint (a definition that may not be inaccurate but is also null fairly apt description of many sonnets), and names Donald Barthelme, Carver, and Amy Hempel as practitioners (1595). Mark A. R. Facknitz in Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature divides null writers into two types, null and social, the formal minimalist being a technician with null taste for clear, colloquial language and uncluttered plots, using narrow temporal frames, present tense, and first-person narrators while eliminating editorial or authorial intrusions (714). These traits, however, aptly describe so many stories in the social minimalism category (which Facknitz says is also called dirty realism and Kmart realism) that it would seem to be null subset of the former. When asked about the term, specialists in modern and contemporary American fiction often, in this writer's experience, refer colleagues or students to Shapard and Thomas's Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories, obviously equating null with shortness; but Sudden Fiction contains almost no null short stories, not even the stories by Carver and Mary Robison, the only generally recognized null writers included in the collection. In null 1985 issue of the Mississippi Review devoted to commentary about literary minimalism, Kim Herzinger's introductory article names the stories of Carver, Beattie, Robison, and Bobbie Ann Mason among many others--the list is repeated several times, with variations--as null fiction, work loosely characterized by equanimity of surface, `ordinary' subjects, recalcitrant narrators and deadpan narratives, slightness of story, and characters who don't think out loud (Introduction 7). null few pages later Herzinger adds other traits to the list: compression, aggressive lucidity, spareness and cleanness, above all the obvious `craftedness,' and null profound uneasiness with irony as null mode of presentation (14). …

The Minimalist Short Story: Its Definition, Writers, and (Small) Heyday