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Raymond Carver is considered to be one of the most important American novelists of the second half of the twentieth century, as well as one of the most influential American short story writers after Ernest Hemingway. Carver’s works are mainly short stories, poems, and some essays, including the short story collections Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Where I Calling From, Cathedral, the poetry collections Winter Insomnia, At Night the Salmon Move, From the East, Light,etc. There is no doubt that when it comes to Raymond Carver, we are all familiar with the concept of minimalism since Carver has been hailed as the “master of minimalism” by many writers, critics, and his admirers. Furthermore, minimalism has been adopted by a number of academic research projects. As a matter of fact, Carver does not agree with this title. In Conversations with Raymond Carver, he stated that minimalism is associated with short-sighted and limited ability. “When I write a novel, I attempt to eliminate any unnecessary details, to pare it down to the bones; however, if I were to do so, I would only have left a few descriptions” (Carver, 2021: 132). Actually, as his living conditions slowly improved later in life, his works became more fleshed out and more plentiful. Minimalism is therefore far from enough to summarize his writings.

1.2 Literature Review

Despite the critical attention that Raymond Carver’s works received during his lifetime, after his death, the trend became increasingly uncontrollable, and an increasing number of scholars and critics examined it from a variety of perspectives. Some scholars focus on the “minimalist” characteristics of Carver’s works, while others conduct external studies of Carver’s works in light of the social environment in which Carver lived, and some others disprove the assertion that Carver belonged to the minimalist camp and consider Carver to be a member of a postmodernist movement. It is essential for my dissertation to draw upon these previous studies.

1.2.1 Previous Studies on the Short Stories of Raymond Carver Abroad

Critical and scholarly attention has been drawn to Carver due to his influence as a literary figure. Carver’s specific texts were initially analyzed based on the themes, characters, and language they presented. In many of his stories, for example, there is no compelling storyline, the characters do not often have individual names, and the language consists mainly of dialogues, which are short and straightforward. These characteristics have led many scholars to study the minimalism of Carver’s works. From 1980 to the end of the twentieth century, scholars from around the world focused on Carver's “minimalism” from three aspects.

Chapter 2 Fictive Exposure

2.1 Self-reflexivity

There is a generalized and narrow sense between metafiction, the former referring to fiction about fiction, which is a manifestation of the author’s self-consciousness and the status of artifacts in its creation. The latter refers to postmodern met本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。