malism, for while various critics agree that minimalism is an identifiable, distinctive mode of literary expression, they decidedly do 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" (Beckson and Ganz 150).
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, Faulkner, or Brecht on the other. What Sartre, Brecht, Faulkner, Beckett, 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. "If happiness and the chase for new happiness keep alive in any sense the will to live," says Nietzsche in a declaration against the rationalist tradition, "no philosophy has perhaps more truth than the cynic's" (Nietzsche 6). Faul...