These readers suggest that Carver, with Cathedral, somehow traded in a rather battered minimalism for a shiny new humanist realism guaranteed to add new mileage to his writing. Much Carver criticism, therefore, finds in his minimal style evidence of postmodern distress, the refusal of the artist to bring a pattern-making vision to the debris of contemporary life (Chénetier 189 German and Bedell 257 Saltzman 9-10).ĢA second strain of Carver criticism grows out of that misreading and argues that Carver rejected his postmodern vehicle after he published What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (Facknitz, “The Calm” 387-388 Shute 1 Stull 6). Because so many Carver short stories present spare glimpses of characters snared in a tattered web of relationships and events whose significance they cannot understand, critics have often assumed that Carver, the artist, also refuses to endow the facts and events in his fiction with underlying significance. 1Raymond Carver’s literary reputation to date illustrates a rather common critical problem: the misreading of an author’s message for his underlying aesthetic theory.
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