Casual silences

This book traces the aesthetic principles of minimal realism from its controversial beginnings in the 1970s to its decline in popularity in the 1990s. The concept of minimal realism used here provides the theoretical framework necessary to understand the aesthetic similarities of the so-called „literary-minimalism“ (the works of Raymond Carver, and the short fiction and early novels of the New Yorker-school authors Ann Beattie and Bobbie Ann Mason) and the „brat pack“ novels of Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis. The defining features of this literary movement are explored using a comparative approach that showcases the differences between the minimal realist poetics and contemporaneous literary trends (such as neo- and experimental realism, metafiction, and fabulism).