not agree on the constituents or the value of such expression.
Any assessment of minimalism as a response to postmodernism must take account of the postmodernist narrative style as well. Beckson and Ganz note two conflicting views of the term postmodernism as overlapping with the modernist label that was attached to the literature of the first part of the twentieth century. The first holds that modernism is a "distinctive cultural phenomenon" that is "defined by its rejection of the literary diction and techniques of the previous [Victorian] period and by its opposition to the social and economic values of bourgeois society." On this view, the work of Joyce, Faulkner, and Eliot can be viewed as modernist. The opposing view holds that the roots of modernism, including existentialist literature that describes an intensely subjective or "post Freudian ethos [and] conflict between the need for individualism and the longing for communality may arguably be traced back at least to the Romantics."3
The nexus of politically and socially radical nineteenth century Romanticism and the content of postmodernism as represented by those writing fiction after World War II is identifiable in the works of such romantics as Goethe and Nietzsche on one hand, and such radical modernists as Sartre or Brecht on the other. What Sartre, Brecht, Beckett, Goethe, and Nietzsche share is an appreciation of what is wrong with the universe and an insight into what might be called the content of nihilism. They all use literary forms to express such content. What sets a Brecht or a Beckett apart from a Nietzsche, however, has more to do with the shape a literary form assumes. In this regard, Murphy develops the idea that postmodernists used a narrative style that was consistent with the ideas it expressed. As she notes, citing Robbe Grillet, "the postmodernists developed a flat, expressionless narrative style to encompass reality as 'it is, quite simp...