PT Journal
AU Maziarczyk, A
SO Romanica Olomucensia
PY 2011
BP 59
EP 65
VL 23
IS 1
DI 10.5507/ro.2011.008
DE Jean Echenoz; minimalist writing; void; blank space; vertigo.
AB Associated with minimalist art due to its stylistic circumspection and impassivity, minimalist writing simultaneously returns to and modifies traditional storytelling techniques. Inspired by everyday, banal reality, Jean Echenoz creates seductive fictions, which mix classic novelistic genres and engage in an intertextual game with the tradition via numerous allusions and quotations. His literary aesthetics relies on the contrast between the baroque plot, multiplying improbable adventures, and concise narration, exploiting blank space, discontinuity and arbitrariness, which destabilise logical continuity and undermine textual equilibrium. Subverting the standard novelistic rules, Echenoz creates modern fiction, which is paradoxically minimalist and vertiginous.
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