Sontag와 Konsinski : 미니말리즘 小考

Abstract

This paper proposes to investigate the nature of literary minimalism, a special fictional aesthetics of postmodernistic bent, as practiced by such writers as Susan Sontag, Jersey Kosinski, Donald Barthelme, and Richard Brautigan, although the more extensive discussions of actual works are limited in this case to Sontags and Kosinskis. A brief study of the nomenclatures proposed by the critics in order to nail down" this postmodernistic, anti-mimetic approaches in recent fiction writing is made in section 1 of this paper. Needless to say, literary minimalism" is only one among many terms that contend for the position of the official" term. However, minimalism" is more suited to describe the works of certain writers than others , since the postmoderns make use of varied fictional methods. Since minimalism is not an isolated thing limited to literature alone, its relationship with other forms of art is discussed in section 2. In section 3 the works by Sontag and Kosinski are discussed at length to illustrate minimalism in practice. There seem to be two important aspects in minimalism: one is its non-referentiality, and the other is its proposition that less is more." The concluding section briefly recapitulates what has been discussed in the preceding sections and offers some concluding remarks.