ernest hemingway - classroom websites · ernest hemingway: modernist genius. biography cultural mom...
TRANSCRIPT
Biography
Cultural mom & outdoorsy dad
Begins love of hunting & fishing
Born in Illinois, summered in Michigan
Journalist, then ambulance driver in
WWI
3 weeks in wounded by shrapnel, 6
months in hospital, 12 operations
Decorated for bravery & fell in love
BiographyHard readjustment, increased
estrangement from family
Married 4 times
1926: The Sun Also Rises
– Finest example of EH style
– Contrasts empty search for sensation w/ rich traditions of Spanish peasants
– Theme: heroes cannot return to that simplicity, too self-aware, but they yearn for it
– Can only develop code & live by it w/ dignity & grace
Biography
1929: A Farewell to Arms
– Soldier & nurse romance
– Life is violence & death, there is no
peace
Increased masculinity: bullfighting,
traveling, big game hunting, war
correspondent; excitement thru danger
Celebrity status
Biography30s: rise in politics in writing, sided w/
poor & peasant classes
Fiercely anti-Nazi
Also successful writer trying to preserve talent in celebrity spotlight
1953: The Old Man and the Sea: Pulitzer Prize; Nobel Prize
in 1954
Shotgun suicide July 1961
StylePioneered this; one of most imitated:
Master of the understatement
Simplified vocabulary & grammar
Master of the compound sentence
Focus on the present
Minimal narrator commentary
Uncontextualized dialogue
“Iceberg” style: 7/8 underwater
StyleOften unsatisfactory endings
Strong & complex men; submissive
women (shows changing gender roles
post-WWI)
Employment of the HEMINGWAY
CODE
Hemingway CodeAll gods are dead
World is a savage place w/o meaning
Man must create his own values & super-impose them on the world
Morality is defined as whatever makes one feel good
Avoidance of :– Abstraction
– Thought
– Speculation (favor action over meditation)
Hemingway CodeAwareness of nothingness & refusal to
discuss it openly
Devotion to duty
Stoicism:
– Control (suppression) of emotions
– Ability to endure
Grace under pressure:
– World is too strong to defeat
– Can retain dignity in face of defeat