How less is more” in the American Minimalist Style: the Short Fiction of Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver

Abstract

The Minimalist style has long been disregarded by critics and scholars because it is believed to have minimal meaning or it is meaningless. In reality, writers of this new kind of style including Ernest Hemingway, its originator in American fiction, and Raymond Carver, his follower and a leader of the Minimalist Movement, rely on the laconic style to express “more” while they treat very important themes in their short stories. The current paper is an attempt to show how these two genius writers express their deep meaning through their minimalist styles by explaining the ideologies behind their adaptation of this kind of style and how they manipulate different literary techniques including understatement, figures of speech, omission, implication, dialogue, and epiphany to convey their themes and worldview. By so doing, the paper aims to disclose one of the most important styles in literary history, which is still unknown amongst Algerian teachers and students, with the aim of encouraging teachers to adopt it in their classrooms due to its simplicity and literariness which make learning literature more profitable and enjoyable.