Ernest Hemingway's "Big Two Hearted River" creates a Utopian space for reimagining multiple senses of time, space, and embodiment. The story is not a mere escape into the woods to nourish the soul of ...the main character, Nick Adams. The text throughout keeps an eye on the structural forces (advanced technologies, techniques for controlling selves and collectives) homogenizing behavior, reductively streamlining concepts of place, objects, time, and bodies. The story carefully creates a counter-discourse (alternative structures), the aims of which are to facilitate embodiment (a human scale) and the possibility of engaging with forms of time and space that elude the processes of industrialization. Hemingway, through his open-ended style and increasingly embodied character, Nick, explores the possibility of relating to the world in a non-dominating, mindful way. The quality of consciousness mapped out are meant to be carried back to a modernist culture as a kind of revolution. Nick, then, is not a self so much as a revolutionary method.
Hemingway and Women Broer, Lawrence R; Holland, Gloria; Sanderson, Rena ...
2002, 2011-05-06
eBook
Female scholars reevaluate gender and the female presence in the life and work of one of America’s foremost writers. Ernest Hemingway has often been criticized as a misogynist because of his ...portrayal of women. But some of the most exciting Hemingway scholarship of recent years has come from women scholars who challenge traditional views of Hemingway and women. The essays in this collection range from discussions of Hemingway’s famous heroines Brett Ashley and Catherine Barkley to examinations of the central role of gender in his short stories and in the novel The Garden of Eden . Other essays address the real women in Hemingway’s life—those who cared for him, competed with him, and, ultimately, helped to shape his art. While Hemingway was certainly influenced by traditional perceptions of women, these essays show that he was also aware of the struggle of the emerging new woman of his time. Making this gender struggle a primary concern of his fiction, these critics argue, Hemingway created women with strength, depth, and a complexity that readers are only beginning to appreciate. "The authors focus on women connected to Hemingway in life, specific female characters, and issues of gender and sexual ambiguities and crossings embodied or enacted by male and female characters. Topics range from reading the feminine in nature to expanding the concept of the code hero to include major female characters." — American Literature "Exceptionally thorough . . . this collection is impressive and unflinching in its exploration." —Ruth Prigozy, Hofstra University Lawrence Broer is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of South Florida and author of a number of books on American literature, including Sanity Plea: Schizophrenia in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut and Rabbit Tales: Poetry and Politics in John Upike’s Rabbit Novels . Gloria Holland is Adjunct Instructor in English at Hillsborough Community College and has coauthored papers with Lawrence Broer on Hemingway, Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
While much of the existing critical work on Ernest Hemingway has represented him as the epitome of macho bravado, and whereas his numerous depictions of animal hunting have been often described as ...theatrical performances of masculinity, this article aims to question such traditional (mis)conceptions by contrasting his early work Green Hills of Africa (1935 2003) to two of his posthumously published texts—namely, An African Story (1986) and Under Kilimanjaro (2005). While the former text may certainly be said to conform to the traditional Hemingwayesque image of hunting as a heavily masculine performance, the two latter texts may be seen to provide radical counterpoints to this, as they not only question the traditional image of animal hunting as a trope of masculinity but also provide a more critical indictment against animal killings. Hemingway’s late texts, both fictional and nonfictional, would thus seem to point to the writer’s often unacknowledged personal and literary evolution, which goes hand in hand with his changed gender and racialized attitudes towards both women and African nonwhites, respectively. Ultimately, Hemingway’s late writings are set within a predatory context of hunting in which the type of relation to any form of otherness (be it gender, race, or animal) shifts into new discursive terrains that allow the author to reconceptualize his own white masculinity.
In this essay I argue that Hemingway's much-discussed inner conflicts and self-contradictions on display in Green Hills of Africa (GHoA) are symptoms of his struggling with cognitive dissonance in ...view of his active contribution to the demise of the natural world he claimed to love. In this, Hemingway's predicament mirrors that of the humankind as a whole in the age of anthropogenic environmental change. Through exploration of selected passages from GHoA and of the way they exemplify specific cognitive biases that influence the way humans interpret and respond to global warming, biodiversity loss, and other environmental crises, I demonstrate the utility of cognitive ecocriticism for illuminating individual and social (in)action on these challenges.
Hemingway has been labeled a ‘communist sympathizer,’ ‘elitist’, and a ‘rugged individualist.’ This volume embraces the complexity of political advocacy in Hemingway’s novels and short stories. ...Hemingway’s characters physically, intellectually and spiritually become part of resisting current conditions and affirm the value of resistance, even destruction, regardless of political outcome. Much more than political nihilism, rebellion allows man to realize the potentialities of his greatness as a leader, the realities of his solidarity as a comrade, and the simple sensations of everyday living. Hemingway draws new perspectives on the meaning of politics in our own lives at the same time as his writings affirm boundaries of political thought and literary theory for explaining many of the themes we study.
Lauretta Conklin Frederking is Associate Professor at the University of Portland.
Part I: Introduction 1. The Rebel: Hemingway and the Struggle Against Politics Lauretta Conklin Frederking Part II: Hemingway in Liberal Times 2. Hemingway on Being in Our Time Catherine Zuckert 3. Hemingway, Hopelessness, and Liberalism William Curtis Part III: The Politics of Morality, Manliness, and God 4. Ethics Without Theodicy in Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms Sayres Rudy 5. Manly Assertion Harvey Mansfield 6. Hemingway, Religion, and Masculine Virtue Joseph Prud’homme Part IV: The Impossibility of Politics 7. Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls : Rebellion and the Meaning of Politics in the Spanish Civil War Kerstin Hamann 8."The Revolutionist" David Winston Conklin 9. To Have and Have Not : Hemingway Through the Lens of Theodor Adorno Lauretta Conklin Frederking
As Hemingway wrote to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, he once thought "A Way You'll Never Be" would give his collection, Winner Take Nothing, an action-packed tale. Instead, the story became what ...Hemingway described as a "hell of a difficult one." At the center of its difficulty and its power are interior monologues from the viewpoint of Nick Adams, who veers between memories of battles on the Italian front, memories of Paris, and dreams centered on a yellow house. In order to understand Nick's monologues, this essay explores four allusions in the story--to an Italian battle cry ("Savoia"), to a "teleferica," to Parisian night scenes, and to a yellow house. Hemingway completed a story whose difficulties are central to its powerful portrait of Nick's struggle for self-command.
Throughout his literary career, Ernest Hemingway shows characters making fateful decisions. But, at the same time, he is careful not to imply or account for how these decisions come about. His ...narrators and protagonists- Frederic Henry, Jake Barnes, Robert Jordan, and others-make life-defining choices but do not realize how momentous these are until much later. About the process (if there is one) by which they make the decisions that determine the course of their lives, Hemingway is silent. For their and, by implication, our own decisions, there is, in Hemingway's view, no explanation.
Throughout his literary career, Ernest Hemingway shows characters making fateful decisions. But, at the same time, he is careful not to imply or account for how these decisions come about. His ...narrators and protagonists- Frederic Henry, Jake Barnes, Robert Jordan, and others-make life-defining choices but do not realize how momentous these are until much later. About the process (if there is one) by which they make the decisions that determine the course of their lives, Hemingway is silent. For their and, by implication, our own decisions, there is, in Hemingway's view, no explanation.
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