Literary Minimalism
Experimental author and editor Gordon Lish consolidated Literary Minimalism in the late 20th century. Literary Minimalism "crafts stories through sentence-level dynamics while eschewing the traditional hallmarks of literary realism such as character development and setting." Addington, Wells. "Gordon Lish and the Development of Literary Minimalism". CEA Critic, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Vol. 78, No. 1 (March 2016), pages 1-23. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26574794 What’s important is that imitation is a natural way to learn. In the golden years of Gordon Lish, when he taught at Columbia, edited for Knopf, and ran the literary magazine The Quarterly, he was known as Captain Fiction. His best students were the most promising young writers in America. And those writers wrote according to his demands and dedicated their work, publically, “To Q,” meaning to Lish, and it was a juggernaut. Lish’s unstoppable army. Unstoppable until it was stopped. The critic Sven Birkerts, writing for The New Republic, called attention to how similar all the great, young Minimalists sounded. They wrote in the first person, in the constantly unspooling present moment, in “byte-sized” perceptions. And Birkerts was correct, and the shining edifice of Minimalism no longer looked like the future. Just as Chick Lit fell out of fashion…Once a style or genre becomes too copied, reader fatigue kills it. So no, the idea isn’t to follow every rule of Gordon’s and Tom’s and mine, not forever. But it’s better to start with some rules. Learn some compulsory skills. After that you can free-style, and if you’re lucky and if you’re successful a new generation of aspiring writers will copy your style and drive your hard-won, well-crafted voice right into the ground. "Direct quote taken from: Palahniuk, Chuck. Consider This. Grand Central Publishing, New York & Boston: 2020.
This literary device appears in the following works: