Paradigms of Authority in the Carver Canon [antikvár]

IntroductionAt the center of interest of the present book is a tool of representation that seems strikingly efficient when describing a particular writing strategy but becomes rather elusive once we aim at defining it. Reduction as a means to the intensity of aesthetic effect is a fundamental element in all types of creative process. While there are reasons to consider artistic creation as an expansion of reality by challenging the limits of communication and, hence, expanding what is communicable, as long as representation is among the goals of the creative process, an element of reduction is inevitably present: both in the choice of the particular means of representation and in the scope, as well as the multiplicity of the world represented. Therefore, an understanding of reduction per se, as an artistic tool, is made difficult by the apparently irreducible complexity of its connotations.The same difficulty arises even if we turn to a particular type of artistic representation that puts reduction in the focus of its aesthetics. Even though literary minimalism is justifiably considered a distinct artistic movement that, among others, contributed to an unprecedented flourishing of the genre of short story in the latter-day history of American literature, its focus on reduction has remained either the target of criticism or the source of the most diverse approaches that range from seeing it as an ideological stance to attributing it to a fundamental distrust in communication.The understanding of the artistic tool of reduction is also burdened by the difficulty of pinpointing its particular limits and goals, especially if we are to conceive them with regard to the similarly elusive notion of minimum as they appear within the critical context of literary minimalism. It seems that the idea of reduction is difficult to grasp in itself because it refers to a process of transformation in which the source, as well as the result of the process are both undefined.However, the argument that reduction does stand in the focus of minimalist writing seems difficult to refute and it makes the term reduction appear similar to that of minimalism, in that they both can prove efficient in designating a particular mode of writing despite their apparent indeterminacy. For these reasons, i.e., that reduction is difficult to conceive alone and that it still appears relevant in discussions about literary minimalism, the following argumentation sets out to present reduction in a particular context in which it is illuminated by a unique phenomenon of latter-day literary history, that of the controversy dominating Raymond Carver's reception history.Raymond Carver's reception historj' can be seen as a narrative that is anything but min-imahst in nature. His role in the discourse on literary minimalism is clearly substantial and