English Literature - Introduction
Minimalism -- John Barth's Description
Minimalism certainly means using fewer words to express thoughts, plots, ideas, quotes and action, but there is more to it than that, according to John Barth. By using Henry James' mantra of "show, don't tell," Barth covers the subject very well. Barth also quotes Edgar Allen Poe, who wrote that "…undue length is…to be avoided." The short story itself is an example of minimalism, simply because it condenses the components of a novel into a much shorter space. There are writers who specialize in what Barth calls "luxuriant abundance" and in "extended analysis," which clearly is the opposite of minimalism; he mentions Guy de Maupassant and Anton Chekov as "masters of terseness" (Barth, 1986).
And because Barth uses examples of well-known writers, he certainly couldn't omit Ernest Hemingway, whose short stories were very tight and yet very expressive with fewer, well-chosen words and phrases. "You could omit anything…and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood" (Barth). Creating minimalist fiction means using "stripped-down vocabulary… [And] a stripped down rhetoric" that reduces figurative language, Barth writes. He extols the virtues of "super-short stories" -- such as one of the stories selected for this assignment, "The Cranes."
Thesis: Learning to write effectively without an overload of descriptive phrases or adjectives, and learning to say more with less by showing, not telling, is the crux of the matter when it comes to minimalism.
The Cranes
In Peter Meinke's short story, the author lets the reader know (through minimal narrative) that the two people watching whooping cranes are not well-to-do and that they are old. The "shower curtain spread over the front seat" is a very short but clear indication that the seat is likely tattered or torn, or otherwise not suitable for sitting on without a cover. But since there are seat covers available in auto supply stories -- and they're probably not cheap -- a reader can assume this was a cost-cutting move on the couple's part. Minimalism, Barth explained,
Readers know that the couple has been in an accident and that they are stuck in some kind of health rut, which probably includes psychological problems. "I could use a few clowns" is a tell-tale admission that the man is depressed or otherwise struggling (Meinke, 1987). He can't get up stairs and...
Kate Chopin, "The Story of an Hour" Kate Chopin's 1894 short story "The Story of An Hour" depicts a major event in a minimalist fashion -- most of the action of the tale takes place in the mind of the protagonist, Louise Mallard. The story fits well with modern summaries of Chopin's achievement in longer fiction: her well-known novel The Awakening, published five years after "The Story of An Hour," would
Cathedral, a story by Raymond Carver, there are three main characters: a husband, a wife, and the wife's blind, male friend. The story is told in the first person, from the point-of-view of the husband, and the mood and tone of the story is austere and tense. At the beginning of the story, the character of the husband is hostile, and angry that the wife's blind friend is coming to
Ernest Hemingway The author Ernest Hemingway specialized in what is known as naturalistic writing. He tells the reader only the basic information about what is going on in a particular short story or novel. Much is told about the natural settings of the stories, but very little is given about the characters in his stories. Instead, the facts about the people, including their personalities and characteristics, have to be inferred by
Carver's "Cathedral" An Analysis of Theme and Plot in Carver's "Cathedral" Raymond Carver states that by the mid-1960s he had tired of reading and writing "long narrative fiction" ("On Writing" 46). Shorter fiction, he found, was more immediate. Flannery O'Connor states a similar idea in The Habit of Being: for her, the novel was a literary medium that could bog down all of one's creative powers. Turning to a short story was
The beginning of the end being her attempted suicide, due to the fact that she felt disconnected from him, her first husband, and the world, as he was in the military and they had constantly moved away from human connections she had made. (Carver NP) Her second marriage, to the insular narrator, going to bed at different times, and he sitting up watching late night television in his insular
6). Beattie, like anyone else, was a product of her times. She is also, again like anyone else, a product of her own individual circumstances. A further interpretation of the bowl as a symbol of the feminine finds a deeper connection between the circumstances of the fictional Andrea and the real-life Ann Beattie. Though she is not especially forthcoming with personal details, there are some facts with which a correlation
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