Raymond Carver is the unwitting poster boy for the minimalist aesthetic in American fiction. His name acts as a stand-in for many things: the institutionalization of writing MFA programs,1 the…
Contemporaries Essays
On Being Okay
“How are you?” “I’m okay.” Sometimes, this quotidian interaction ends there. Other times, the universally neutral refrain of “I’m okay” is countered by “No, but how are you really?” —…
There’s No Such Thing as Silence: Recovering the Stakes of Minimalism’s Refusal in the Work of Nikita Gale
Installed in a gallery at the California African American Museum from March to May of 2021, Private Dancer was the multidisciplinary artist Nikita Gale’s first solo museum exhibition. Installed in…
Situating Minimalism: Kara Walker’s Black Dimensionality
Minimalism haunts the production of the present, and over the last decade mainstream attention has been afforded to the graphic elements in contemporary Black arts and culture. Minimalist abstraction manifests…
Historical Injury and Asian American Literary Minimalism
When it was published in 2002, Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine offered a literary representation of Japanese American internment that was quite different from previous narratives.1 Employing the…
On Ambience, Tan Lin, and American Minimalism
What is the minimum volume (and quality) of material or statistical quantity of words necessary to induce a rehearsal of the generic exercise we might term “reading” or an aesthetic…
Minimal Thoughts: Cognition in the Wake of Slow Crisis
Accounts of minimalism’s ascent in postwar American fiction vary, but one common scholarly perspective links the aesthetic with war fiction, specifically Vietnam War narratives and Ernest Hemingway’s World War I…
“It comes down to / so little”: Ashbery, Matthíasdóttir, and Minimal Afterlives
In Something Close to Music, a recent posthumous collection of his scattered art criticism (plus poems and playlists), John Ashbery writes of the work of the late Icelandic painter Louisa Matthíasdóttir…
“A Handshake Is Available Upon Request”: Severance and the Uneasiness of Sparsity
The offices of biotech company Lumon are empty. Hallways and rooms are bare, though not totally insipid. Once exiting the corridors, workers’ units bear a splash of colour — green…
An Introduction to “Minimalisms Now: Race, Affect, Aesthetics”
Are we all minimalist now? In early 2019, U.S. news organizations reported a surge of clothing and other donations to charity shops, a surge they called the Marie Kondo effect.1…