Raymond Carver Research Articles

An Analysis of the “Minimalist” Narration in Cathedral

This paper analyzes the minimalist narrative techniques in Raymond Carver’s short story collection, Cathedral, highlighting how his unique narrative style redefines the short story form. The study finds that Carver’s use of internal and external focalization enhances the realism of his narratives, allowing readers to experience events through a more subjective and fragmented lens. The incomplete narrative structures and open endings in his stories mirror the complexities and uncertainties of real life, encouraging readers to actively interpret and engage with the text. Carver's concise language—characterized by short sentences and everyday speech—effectively distills complex emotions and situations, offering a profound reflection of the human condition. These findings demonstrate Carver's significant contribution to minimalist literature and his ability to capture the nuances of ordinary existence.

‘At the Edge of the Intactile Dark’: Gothic Minimalism in Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger and Stella Maris

ABSTRACT This article explores how Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger (2022) and Stella Maris (2022) cement a reliance on Gothic literary minimalism. Although minimalism and the Gothic are traditionally positioned as aesthetic opposites, with the former orientated toward stylistic sparsity and the latter an art of excess, I examine how both converge in these interconnected novels to further an affective atmosphere of lessness and loss. Recalling McCarthy’s prior affiliation with both aesthetic contexts, I argue that these novels consider the emptiness of genre and event via a pre-established aesthetic of Gothic minimalism borrowed from postwar American literary traditions to expose societal structures of exhaustion. Through a reading of McCarthy’s duology alongside key minimalists from the twentieth century including Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver, I suggest that this attenuation of the Gothic is symptomatic of a significant but unacknowledged affective tonality underpinning American minimalist writing.

Same Author, Same Stories, Different Unity: A Close Comparative Reading of a Selection of Stories from Raymond Carver's <i>What We Talk About When We Talk About Love </i>and <i>Beginners</i>

This essay provides a close comparative reading of three stories from Raymond Carver’s short story cycles Beginners and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. A working definition of short story cycles is developed and referenced in the evaluations of these stories—this definition utilizes literary scholar Gerald Lynch’s work on the sub-genre. The close comparative analyses of “Why Don’t You Dance?”, “One More Thing”, and “Gazebo” reveal that both collections meet the criteria of short story cycles, however, Beginners has a stronger unity that achieved through its shared themes. This supports the argument that Carver’s editor, Gordon Lish, exchanged Carver’s unity of theme in Beginners for a weaker unity of style in What We Talk About.

Features of subtext in E. Hemingway and R. Carver’s dialogues (based on the analysis of their short stories)

The article provides a comparative analysis of the implication features used in the dialogues of the stories by Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver, his follower of the second half of the 20th century. Our analysis is based on their texts written in different years. Employing specific examples, we analyzed the authors’ work on the use of the main subtext elements: A pause or silence, incompleteness and repetitions. The highlighted elements of the implication allow us to make conclusions about the direct influence of Hemingway on the poetics of Raymond Carver’s stories. The comparison of the presented techniques illustrates the authors’ strategies used for the emotional involvement of the reader in the process of deciphering the text, as well as the desire to compress the text without losing its semantic depth.The relevance of the article is determined by the growing interest in the realistic short story, in particular, in the creative legacy of Raymond Carver. The articles and works, devoted to his prose and poetic works, continue to appear in foreign and Russian literary criticism. The analysis of the subtext peculiarities in dialogues allows us to contribute to the study of dialogue strategies, which in the 20th-century literature perform the plot-moving function and disclose psychological characteristics of the character. In addition, the comparative analysis of the writers’ stories helps understand the features of Raymond Carver’s creative method.The methodological basis of the article is the cultural-historical and comparative methods.

The Literary Bias: Narrative and the Self

Abstract: Narratives are an interface that evolution has instilled in our brains for their optimal interaction with reality. Without them we would not be who we are: creatures that narrativize their experiences, integrate them into their autobiographical self, and imagine the future of this self. But narratives also distort reality by endowing it with meaning, purpose, and causality even when none exist. Literary stories with weak narrativity, such as those by Raymond Carver, remind us of another modality of the human mind and selfhood available to us, one that registers the world without subjecting it to narrative selection and chronological ordering.

레이먼드 카버의 「대성당」과 조해진의「빛의 호위」에 나타난 감각 활용 비교: 표현주의의 새로운 기능을 중심으로

This thesis analyzes how ‘expressionism’ is used in contemporary literature through reading Cathedral by Raymond Carver and Escorted by Lighted by hae-jin Cho. ‘Expressionism’ is an art period that appeared in the 20th century and has the aim to express a subjective psychological condition of a character. This thesis limits ‘expressionism’ to the ‘senses’ of humans. The first person and the main character of each two short-story portrays vividly the inner world of themselves through the ‘five senses’, especially the ‘sense of touch’ and the ‘sense of sight’. Furthermore, the utilization of ‘sense of touch’ and ‘sense of sight’ have the feature of the medium of the narrator to understand other people. Eventually, the ‘expressionism’ in contemporary literary works has the hopeful function of suggesting ‘the possibility of solidarity’ and beyond ‘the connection to the community’.

Foreword

In the past decades, a large body of literature has been produced by researchers interested in the relationships between schools, teachers and parents (or families). This literature includes analyses and reflections on parental involvement from myriad research disciplines, theoretical and policy perspectives and research methodologies. However, closer scrutiny reveals that the label of “parental involvement” is an umbrella term, under which many different concepts and practices find a place. In this special issue we invited authors to delve more deeply into controversies and dilemmas that result from the variety of perspectives on parental involvement. Some examples of such controversies and dilemmas are: the use of parental involvement as a predictor of academic achievement in school effectiveness studies, parents’ rights and teachers’ stress, critiques on the neoliberal agenda that dictates effective parenting practices, inequality of access to diverse forms of parental resources, and the marginalizing effects of particular frameworks of parental involvement. The purpose of this special issue was aimed to provide a basis for future research and policies on family-school-partnership relations. We invited authors to formulate implications of their analyses and reflections for research, policy and practice. The title itself of the issue, a calque borrowed from "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" by Raymond Carver, was an invitation towards a deeper understanding of the meaning of “parental involvement”. Topics discussed in this special issue are: teachers’ students’ and parents’ perspectives, teacher education, teacher students, teachers’ beliefs; homework, all day school, trust, parental engagement; comparative studies in education, also for what concerns National educational policies and diverse ethnic and linguistic families; emotional work, frontstage and backstage, stigma. Have a good read

Collecting Sarah Piatt at the Ohio State University's Rare Books & Manuscripts Library

Collecting Sarah Piatt at the Ohio State University's Rare Books & Manuscripts Library

Одноактные пьесы как часть творческого наследия Раймонда Карвера

Raymond Carver is a master of the short story and has also written three one-act plays exploring themes of infidelity, communication in marriage, and people's acceptance of their own roles and bodies. He has also collaborated with poet Tess Gallagher on a movie script about Dostoevsky. Carver's plays and screenplays have never been published or staged on, but his experiments with the genre helped him to learn how to use dramaturgical techniques to create the texts of his stories, which makes his creative legacy interesting to analyze in terms of assessing their stage potential.

Американское предложение

The nature, history and transformation of the American sentence in XX century American fiction is the focus of the current essay which examines the shift from the oracular to ordinary style. This is the contrast between Henry James and Ernest Hemingway, or Thomas Wolfe and Cormac McCarthy. It is a shift in tone and syntax from an elaborate rhetoric and rhythm to a pointed, direct style that wastes no words. It suggests an impatient style reflecting an age of intensity, speed, and thrust. The leisurely and intricate style of late XIX and early XX century American writers loses its energy, although individual authors experiment and, within the body of their work, shift from an initial, ornate method to one that is immediate and precise. A new, fragmented cogency takes over, although this is not a prescriptive formula. There is a stylistic pendulum at work alternating between, say, the elaborate writing of David Foster Wallace or Don DeLillo and that of Raymond Carver or Jennifer Egan. The dynamics of this shift is the center of this discussion. Examples of XX century writers include Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, J.D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy and Jennifer Egan. Overlooked, the sentence remains the core of literary expression but it is a problematic form associated with such cultural changes as the telegraph, World War II and crime writing, as much as the literary imagination. Its permutations may, in fact, represent the “moral history” of America, its shifts in style reflecting the conflict between traditionalism and innovation, conservatism and experimentation.

「우리는 사랑에 대해 이야기를 할 때 무엇을 이야기할까」와 『향연』 속 에로스/사랑론에 대한비교 독해

This essay, as a case of comparative literary studies, analyzes an ancient text, Plato’s Symposium, and a contemporary piece of short fiction, “What we Talk About When We Talk About Love”, written by Raymond Carver, an American short story writer and poet. The two texts share similar themes and settings. The Symposium, adopting the device of a play-within-play, is about a dialogue between Apollodorus and his friends about a symposium held by Agathon after he had won the prize at a dramatic competition. Seven speakers then share their ideas or theories about Eros (the Greek god or love): Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes, Agathon, Socrates, and Alcibiades. Each one argues for or against the concept of Eros. Phaedrus claims that Eros is good and beautiful because he is eldest god, while Aristophanes tells a myth in which the ancient human beings are severed by the force of god. Socrates claims that Eros brings forth due to the lack. Carver’s story has similar setting, in which four characters — Mel, Terry, Rick, Laura — at a drinking party share their ideas about love. They talk about two incidents related to love: Ed’s bizzare case and an old couple’s tragic case. A parallel analysis of two texts show how those texts share similar and different ideas about love. Though not regarding Carver’s story as a parody of The Symposium, the essay at least endeavors to delve into a possible comparative reading of two texts and how those texts may be deconstructed.

A Brief Analysis of Raymond Carver's Short Stories from a Marxism Perspective

Marxist materialism shows that social existence determines social consciousness, so the era Carver writes about is not an era fabricated out of thin air; it is the era of the era in which he lives, and Carver's characters are also the characters of the era in which they live. The various stories of misfortune, bad and despair they experience are the evidence of the Vietnam War, the feminist movement, sexual liberation, the Watergate scandal, and a series of events that happened in this era. Most of Carver's characters work in sales, service, and other low-paying jobs, and they are part of the multitude of the proletariat. Just like Carver's own experience, he realized in his labor that the bourgeoisie oppressed and exploited them, and that the bourgeoisie's proclamation of equality and freedom for all was only a rhetoric to cover up their ugliness, selfishness, and unpleasantness. With his keen observation, Carver captures the objection of human beings in this era and sees the contradictions and conflicts of capitalist society. This paper will adopt the text-reading strategy to explore the process of alienation of Carver's characters, the realism of content creation and its roots, as well as the humanitarian light shining in it.

Die Kunst der Einfachheit: Standortbestimmungen in der deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur: Judith Hermann–Peter Stamm–Robert Seethaler by Nadine Wisotzki

Reviewed by: Die Kunst der Einfachheit: Standortbestimmungen in der deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur: Judith Hermann–Peter Stamm–Robert Seethaler by Nadine Wisotzki Julie Winter Nadine Wisotzki, Die Kunst der Einfachheit: Standortbestimmungen in der deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur: Judith Hermann–Peter Stamm–Robert Seethaler. Gegenwartsliteratur 10. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2021. 226 pp. "Heute ist vieles komplex, so komplex, dass wir uns zunehmend nach Einfachheit sehnen" (9). With these words, Nadine Wisotzki takes on the [End Page 97] daunting task of attempting to define the concept of "Einfachheit," especially in the context of literature, and illuminating certain trends among modern German writers. I will not translate the word Einfachheit here because it implies more than the idea of "simplicity" in literature. What is meant may be closer to "minimalism," but since the author deals with the concept in several different contexts, it is probably best to avoid using a translated term. The scale of the project quickly becomes clear in this two-part book: the first three chapters grapple with exactly what Einfachheit is—generally and in literature—and outline how researchers and critics have attempted to treat it systematically as a literary concept, while the second part focuses on its manifestation in the novels and short stories of Judith Hermann, Peter Stamm, and Robert Seethaler. From the early twentieth century on, Wisotzki maintains, there has been a strong longing for Einfachheit in Western culture. Here the word "simplicity" is appropriate, as are the terms "simple," "functional," "ease of use," and indeed "harmony." As life feels ever more complex and fast-paced, people increasingly think about how to make it simpler and how to return to a more "natural" way of living. Technology, architecture, and lifestyle choices all reflect this longing. The goal of the producers of Apple computers, for example, is to offer complex technology in sleek machines and to make the experience of using them "friendly." Striving for simplicity is not limited to technology; the Bauhaus movement is well known for its focus on simplicity and functionality in architecture, art, furniture, and many other everyday consumer products. Furthermore, books abound that attempt to teach us how to lead simpler, more pared-down lives, and the idea of reducing complexity has been present in non-Western societies as well, such as in Japanese culture, for many centuries. But how does this longing for a simpler way of living manifest itself as a literary concept? To answer this question, Wisotzki turns her attention to the history of the concept of Einfachheit. Attempts to chronicle the history of the term have been so broad and used in so many different contexts that it is difficult to convey a comprehensible history of the concept. Nevertheless, the author provides what may be seen as a type of Forschungsbericht before arriving at a working definition of Einfachheit in literature. As noted above, the term has to do with minimalism in storytelling. Minimalism is not a new phenomenon; however, it has received special emphasis starting in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. American authors Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway, and [End Page 98] Raymond Carver adhered to a kind of minimalism, a concept summed up by Hemingway in his thought that "[y]ou could omit anything if you knew that you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood" (69). The section on the minimalist movement in twentieth-century American writers is illuminating and builds a bridge into the second part of the book, in which Wisotzki presents and discusses characteristics of minimalism in the writings of Hermann, Stamm, and Seethaler, featured in the book's subtitle. Hermann's Aller Liebe Anfang, Stamm's Ungefähre Landschaft, and Seethaler's Ein ganzes Leben are among the eighteen texts described and analyzed in detail. In Hermann's Aller Liebe Anfang, for example, Wisotzki illustrates how the novelist relays the story "mit sprachlicher Knappheit und einer überschaubaren Figurenzahl" (101). In addition, insights from the authors themselves reveal more about the minimalist nature of their works. Hermann recounts a time when she worked at a newspaper in New York as "schnell, intensiv und zugleich kurzlebig, flüchtig" (94), adjectives that also characterize her...

DIMENSI CINTA DALAM CERPEN SEBUAH PERTANYAAN UNTUK CINTA DAN CERPEN WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT LOVE

This study intends to compare the two short stories entitled Sebuah Pertanyaan untuk Cinta by Seno Gumira Ajidarma with the short story What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver. This research uses qualitative descriptive, in order to describe the dimensions of love from the two short stories with psychological aspects. The method used is to examine the psychological aspects of the characters, then compare the contents of the two short stories based on the dimensions of love. The object of comparative literature discussed is related to the dimension of love. The library technique is a data acquisition process. The results of this study are that there are various human efforts in exploring the dimensions of love based on psychology. Each of these dimensions affects the behavior of individuals in behaving and thinking when oriented. Therefore, the dimensions of love that are studied by psychology consist of the id, ego, and superego which are then analyzed based on the dimensions of love including, domination, self-process, commitment, attachment, satisfaction, and conflict.Keywords: Short Stories, Dimensions of Love, Psychology, Comparative Literature.

각색 영화 <숏컷>: 문학과 영화의 서사망

This paper is research on adaptation with a case of Robert Altman’s film Short Cuts, a cinematic collection of 9 short stories and 1 poem written by Raymond Carver. Short Cuts builds a “network narrative” as a multi-stranded movie in stories, plots and characters whose links seem to be accidental in mosaic shots. It also serves as a theme of randomness or luck happening in life as well as directorial techniques. This research examines the film’s network of literature and film in two aspects, a structure and a theme. Altman made the inroads into a movie industry and a new approach to adaptation studies: revisiting and redefining concept of original texts; identifying limits of fidelity-oriented adaptation studies. Being aware of filmic languages such as cuttings and shots, as the movie title shows, is part of the efforts to acknowledge and appreciate creative originality of adaptation movies.

The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism by Mary K. Holland

Reviewed by: The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism by Mary K. Holland Marshall Boswell Mary K. Holland. The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism. Bloomsbury, 2020. viii + 288 pp. Is realism a periodic term or an honorific denoting a novel's success at rendering the real? Does the term refer to a set of formal novelistic conventions, neither more nor less valued than the conventions of surrealism or metafiction, or does it denote a text's ethical adherence to truth and accuracy? And at a time when quantum physics and the impenetrable barriers of postmodern simulacra reduce our grasp of everyday reality to something close to guesswork, does the term even have any value in the context of contemporary fiction? In her remarkable new book, The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism, Mary K. Holland cuts through these questions to propose a new and capacious definition of contemporary realism grounded in the clarifying dictum that "changes in how we view the world necessitate changes in how we represent the world" (153). Organizing her study under the umbrella term "poststructural realism" (257), Holland guides her readers through a series of contemporary texts by writers as diverse as David Foster Wallace, Steve Tomasula, Ted Chiang, Ruth Ozeki, and Don DeLillo, demonstrating the startling ways many ostensibly antirealist fictions actually seek to depict our increasingly unstable and elusive interactions with phenomenal reality. From its inception, realism, as envisioned by William Dean Howells and Henry James, always denoted an ethical agenda. Howells's own vague description of realism as "the sincere and conscientious endeavor to picture life" (qtd. in Holland 4) somewhat conceals the underlying telos of realistic narratives—namely, to bring their protagonists to accurately see the underlying texture of the reality they're inhabiting. When James's Isabel Archer encounters Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond in silent contemplation beside the fireplace, she begins to see the machinations that have been going on behind her back all along. As James makes the case elsewhere, the goal is to be one on whom nothing is lost. James Joyce's secular epiphanies grow out of this realist agenda of proper and even transcendent seeing, a point grasped keenly by Erik Auerbach, whose 1946 Mimesis updates realism for the modernist novel via the argument, paraphrased by Holland, that "the external, objective world exists, for the individual and for fiction, in order to provoke the mind's experience of these truths" (11). Not surprisingly, Holland positions her poststructural realism as a continuation of Auerbach's modernist updating. She adds to her genealogy Frederic Jameson's Marxist-poststructural critique, [End Page 378] which she explains as a claim that all forms of realism are ultimately failed "aesthetic modes for delivering ideological content" (28). After listing twenty contemporary realisms coined between 1983 (the "dirty realism" [31] of Raymond Carver and company) and 2014 (Holland's own "metafictive realism" [32]), she narrows her focus to three primary branches of poststructural realism. These branches are metafictive realism, which "uses self-reflective devices to allow language to invoke and connect the reader to the real world" (40); material realism, which "uses language and physical form to draw attention to the physical reality of the book and language's impact on the physical world"; and quantum realism, which invites us "to "consider the quantum reality we live in and its effects on our experience and on literary form." About Wallace, Holland demonstrates that his use of metafictional self-reflexivity seeks not to sever his fiction from the real world but rather to mimic our own self-conscious encounter with postmodern reality, an approach that feels all the more pertinent and urgent after a year of engaging with the world through the self-reflective Zoom. Similarly, she argues that a book such as J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst's S. (2013), which includes a novel, a set of notes from two readers, and a scattering of supplementary material including a decoder, "uses the print book to materialize various acts of reading and writing" (135). But Holland's most innovative and startling intervention is her lengthy exploration of quantum realism, which occupies her book's second half. Building on Samuel Coale's Quirks of the Quantum...

Hirschhorn’s Dilemma, or How Not to Ride Two Horses at Once

In a 2003 interview by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Thomas Hirschhorn clarified his typology of sculptural-architectural forms situated between high culture and mass culture, private sentiment and public expression. The Raymond Carver Altar, Piet Mondrian Altar, Ingeborg Bachmann Altar, and Otto Freundlich Altar take the form of spontaneous memorials that so often mark sites of tragic and violent death. In them, motley collections of laminated photographs, flickering candles, cellophane-wrapped bouquets, and personalised mementos declare collective grief and devotion. Like the Altars, the more expansive Monuments – dedicated to Baruch Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze, Georges Bataille, Antonio Gramsci – express what Hal Foster has called an archival impulse, a ‘move to (re)cathect cultural remnants’, namely the work and thought of radical philosophers and artists.1 It was in the face of the ‘failure’ of the Deleuze Monument, which the artist was forced to dismantle prematurely, that Hirschhorn first articulated the principle of ‘presence and production’ that subsequently governed the Bataille Monument, Gramsci Monument, and his numerous other works in public space. 2 Immersive and of limited duration, ‘presence and production’ works are often situated in working class neighbourhoods and realised with the aid of their inhabitants, who have been subjected to the legacies of colonialism and political and economic marginalisation. The Altars and Monuments bear the hallmarks of Hirschhorn’s approach to artwork in public space: adoption of exacerbated weakness in relation to urban surroundings, especially through mimicry of states of devaluation; development of a lexicon of provisional structures; appropriation of the language of non-art material culture; and activation of processes of identification and (as Claire Bishop has stressed) disidentification vis-à-vis the publics to which they are addressed.3

LIÊN KÍ HIỆU TRONG TRUYỆN NGẮN HARUKI MURAKAMI

Applying the theory of intersignality to study the Murakami's short stories, I found that although he was a master of storytelling, his short stories were mostly based on the stories of a certain author. We do not see it as a plagiarism phenomenon because Murakami has a sense of dialogue or writing differently than previous writers. But that shows a limitation in Murakami's artistic creation. In addition, he aimed to make money in writing so he wrote long and so much. Reading Murakami's stories has a certain boredom. During his writing career, Murakami was influenced by Kafka, Hemingway and especially Raymond Carver. He has little influence from Japanese writers. And even though Japanese writers criticize his writing as a detachment from his tradition, Murakami is still a Japanese writer. The only difference is that he wants to target a global audience.

人間の尊厳と二つの貧困――カーヴァー，スタインベック，コールドウェル

人間の尊厳と二つの貧困――カーヴァー，スタインベック，コールドウェル

Композиционные и жанровые особенности сборника рассказов Р. Карвера «Собор»

The paper explores the compositional and genre features of Raymond Carver’s short story collection Cathedral. The analysis of the problems raised in the short stories, the system of characters and the principles of narrative organization reveal the cyclical structure of the book.