Teaching Hemingway and Modernism

Joseph Fruscione

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781631011740
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Enseñanza de las artes lingüísticas

Teaching Hemingwayin his time

Teaching Hemingway and Modernism presents concrete, intertextual models for using Hemingway's work effectively in various classroom settings, so students can understand the pertinent works, definitions, and types of avant-gardism that inflected his art. The fifteen teacher-scholars whose essays are included in the volume offer approaches that combine a focused individual treatment of Hemingway's writing with clear links to the modernist era and offer meaningful assignments, prompts, and teaching tools.

The essays and related appendices balance text, context, and classroom practice while considering a broad and student-based audience. The contributors address a variety of critically significant questions—among them:

How can we view and teach Hemingway's work along a spectrum of modernist avant-gardism?

How can we teach his stylistic minimalism both on its own and in conjunction with the more expansive styles of Joyce, Faulkner, Woolf, and other modernists?

What is post modernist about an author so often discussed exclusively as a modernist, and how might we teach Hemingway's work vis-à-vis that of contemporary authors?

How can teachers bridge twentieth- and twentyfirst- century pedagogies for Hemingway studies and American literary studies in high school, undergraduate, and graduate settings? What role, if any, should new media play in the classroom?

Teaching Hemingway and Modernism is an indispensable tool for anyone teaching Hemingway, and it offers exciting and innovative approaches to understanding one of the most iconic authors of the modernist era.

Appendix A

Stylistic Consistencies Between Stein’s The Making of Americans and Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms

From Stein’s “Picasso”:

One whom some were certainly following was one who was completely charming. One whom some were certainly following was one who was charming. One whom some were following was one who was completely charming. One whom some were following was one who was certainly completely charming. … One whom some were certainly following and some were certainly following him, one whom some were certainly following was one certainly working. (104–5)

From Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home”:

Nothing was changed in the town except that the young girls had grown up. But they lived in such a complicated world of already defined alliances and shifting feuds that Krebs did not feel the energy or the courage to break into it. … Most of them had their hair cut short. … They all wore sweaters and shirt waists with round Dutch collars. It was a pattern. He liked to look at them from the front porch as they walked on the other side of the street. He liked to watch them walking under the shade of the trees. He liked the round Dutch collars above their sweaters. He liked their silk stockings and flat shoes. He liked their bobbed hair and the way they walked. … He liked the girls that were walking along the other side of the street. He liked the look of them much better than the French girls or the German girls. But the world they were in was not the world he was in. He would like to have one of them. But it was not worth it. They were such a nice pattern. He liked the pattern. It was exciting. But he would not go through with all the talking. He did not want one badly enough. He liked to look at them all, though. It was not worth it. Not now when things were getting good again.

From Stein’s Three Lives:

The good Anna had high ideals for canine chastity and discipline. The three regular dogs, the three that always lived with Anna, Peter and old Baby, and the fluffy little Rags, who was always jumping up into the air just to show that he was happy, together with the transients, the many stray ones that Anna always kept until she found them homes, were all under strict orders never to be bad with the other. … You see that Anna led an arduous and troubled life. (8)

From Hemingway’s “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot”:

Mr. and Mrs. Elliot tried very hard to have a baby. They tried as often as Mrs. Elliot could stand it. They tried in Boston after they were married and they tried coming over on the boat. They did not try very often on the boat because Mrs. Elliot was quite sick. She was sick and when she was sick she was sick as Southern women are sick. That is women from the Southern part of the United States. Like all Southern women Mrs. Elliot disintegrated very quickly under sea sickness, travelling at night, and getting up too early in the morning. (161)

From Stein’s The Making of Americans:

Miss Charles was then one having general moral and special moral aspirations and general unmoral desires and ambitious and special unmoral ways of carrying them into realisation and there was never inside her any contradiction and this is very common in very many kinds of them of men and women and later in the living of Alfred Hersland there will be so very much discussion of this matter and now there will be a little explanation of the way it acts in the kind of men and women of which Miss Charles was one. (462)

From Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms:

I loved to take her hair down and she sat on the bed and kept very still, except suddenly she would dip down to kiss me while I was doing it, and I would take out the pins and lay them on the sheet and it would be loose and I would watch her while she kept very still and then take out the last two pins and it would all come down and she would drop her head and we would both be inside of it, and it was the feeling of inside a tent or behind a falls. (114)

Appendix B

Sample Assignments and In-Class Prompts

1.If Stevens and Hemingway alike are approaching meditative states of emptiness of thought, of unprejudiced reflection, how do they represent these states? What historical (extratextual) or dramatic (intratextual) compulsions are there for these empty, meditative states?

2.Can a meditative state be a heroic attitude? Does the meditative tone of “Big Two-Hearted River” help adjust the popular image of Hemingway as a connoisseur of physical force?

3.What is happening in Hemingway’s descriptions of nature if the outlines and substance of the material object are not “mirrored”—that is, if his project is not mimetic? Students may consider how Hemingway’s sentences come to be objects in their own right that suggest less the objects themselves than the sturdiness and quotidian reliability of his experience of objects; or they may discuss the reliability of objects (e.g., fish, rivers, coffeepots, meals of beans) themselves.

4.Students of American literature familiar with Emerson can compare his mandates in “The Poet” for a locally based literature unafraid to indulge the extraordinary to Stevens and Hemingway.

5.If students have had a world literature and/or a philosophy class, they might consider the meditative moments in Hemingway’s fiction alongside accessible strains of ancient (e.g., Epicurean and stoical), modern (e.g., Santayana, Heidegger), and postmodern (e.g., Wittgenstein) philosophy that explore the relationship of perception to knowledge.

Appendix C

Hemingway and “the Code”

For many years it was argued, or assumed, that Hemingway’s fiction was governed by a code of behavior that could be articulated as follows: Life in our time is subject to both predictable and random threats of violence, pain, and death. At any moment, an individual’s pleasure, dignity, freedom, or life itself may be threatened by vast impersonal forces, over which he or she has no control whatsoever. In the face of this absurd condition, the following code of conduct is prescribed.

1.We should attempt to know things as they truly are, as a result of direct, immediate experience;

2.We should develop the specific understanding, skills, and habits of mind that will enable us to cope with these threats to our pleasure, dignity, freedom, and life;

3.We should cultivate vigorous physical talents, vital sensory responses, and authentic aesthetic tastes;

4.Our knowledge, skill, ability, and courage should be frequently tested in action;

5.“Don’t talk about it.” We should strive to be reticent, and to practice understatement, rather than to indulge in garrulousness and braggadocio, both of which should be avoided. This applies to both good things, which could be cheapened or tarnished, or could even disappear as a result of talking about them, and bad experiences, which cannot be changed or forgotten by dwelling on them.

6.“Don’t think about it.” We should not allow our minds to dwell on painful memories of the past or fearful anticipation of the future (“fishing the swamp”). If we think too much about these things, we run the risk of self-pity, despair, or paralysis. Similarly, if we yearn too nostalgically for lost pleasure or fantasize future happiness, we run other risks.

7.In any society, only a select few understand this code and live by it. They are in some sense, the initiates of a fraternity, and they recognize their kinship and their mutual bond almost instantly.

This presumed code remains one of the most familiar and pervasive myths of Hemingway studies. Although it is neither stated in a single work of fiction by Hemingway nor appears in this sort of detailed form in any single interpretation of Hemingway’s works, scholars have inferred it from many readings of particular Hemingway texts. Its most important impetus comes from Ernest Hemingway, a 1952 book by Philip Young, and it was common currency among Hemingway’s expositors and advocates for forty years or more. Over time, however, the close reading of Hemingway’s texts also showed that no one of Hemingway’s protagonists perfectly embodies every aspect of the code. While these characters may have sometimes judged themselves adversely according to these standards, they also show the limitations of the code itself. Eventually, the code came to be seen as arbitrary, limited, and reductive—an inadequate tool for interpreting the complex world of Hemingway’s fiction.

Appendix D

Chronology and Lineage, The Sound and the Fury

Chronology

Saturday, 7 April 1928: “Benjy,” 5–75

[Thursday], 2 June 1910: “Quentin,” 76–129

Friday, 6 April 1928: “Jason,” 180–264

Sunday, 8 April 1928 “Dilsey,” 265–321

Narrative Scenes

1.7 Apr. 1928: Luster and Benjy, 3:1–4:24: Looking for a golf ball; Benjy’s birthday.

2.23 Dec. 1908: Benjy and Caddy, 3:25–6:29: Uncle Maury’s letter to Mrs. Patterson.

3.1912 or 1913: Mrs. Compson, Benjy, T.P, 9:12–12:17: Trip to cemetery without Jason.

4.Spring or Summer 1908: Benjy, Mr. Patterson, 13:28–14:5: First letter to Mrs. Patterson.

5.1900: Benjy, Quentin (I), Caddy, Jason, 17:18–9:13: Damuddy’s death; Caddy’s muddy drawers.

6.25 Apr. 1910: Benjy, 20:25–22:23; Benjy, T.P., Quentin, Caddy, 20:25–22:23: Caddy’s wedding.

7.2 June 1910: Benjy, T.P., Dilsey, Roskus, 28:9–29:6; 29:11–30:5: Quentin’s suicide.

8.1912: Benjy, Roskus, Versh, Dilsey, 29:7–10; 30:6–32:19: Death of Mr. Compson.

9.1915: Benjy, Dilsey, Luster, 33:9–12, 17–24: Roskus’s death.

10.1906: Benjy, Caddy, Dilsey 40:28–43:6 Caddy and Benjy give perfume to Dilsey.

11.1908–1910 (?): Benjy, Caddy, Charlie, 46:16–25, 29–31; 47:1–48:18: Caddy and Charlie in swing.

12.Spring or Summer 1910: Benjy, girls, 51:19–53:10: Benjy at gate, “trying to say”; Attacks girl.

13.1900: Benjy, Caddy, Dilsey, Mrs. Compson, 56:4–11: Benjy’s name changed.

14.Nov. 1908 or 1909: Benjy, Caddy, Quentin, 66:20–29, & esp. 68:24–69:5: Caddy’s loss of virginity.

Chronology of Scenes

1.Damuddy’s death; Caddy’s muddy drawers.

2.Benjy’s name change.

3.Caddy and Benjy give perfume to Dilsey.

4.Benjy takes letter to Mrs. Patterson.

5.Benjy and Caddy take second letter to Mrs. Patterson.

6.Caddy and Charlie in the swing.

7.Caddy loses virginity.

8.Caddy’s wedding.

9.Benjy misses Caddy, watches for her at the gate, attacks Burgess girl, is castrated.

10.Suicide of Quentin (I)

11.Father’s death.

12.Mother and Benjy driven to cemetery by T.P.

13.Roskus; death.

14.Luster and Benjy look for a quarter; Benjy’s birthday. They see Quentin (II) leave the window of the house and climb down the tree.

Lineage Chart

Page references are to Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury: The Corrected Text, ed. Noel Polk (New York: Random Vintage International, 1981)

This material was derived and adapted from Cleanth Brooks, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (New Haven: Yale UP, 1963); John T. Mathews, The Sound and the Fury: Faulkner and the Lost Cause (Boston: Twayne, 1991); and Stephen M. Ross and Noel Polk, Reading Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury: Glossary and Commentary (Jackson: U Mississippi P, 1996).

Appendix E

Discussion Questions and Writing Assignment

Discussion Questions

Note to educators: These questions are posted in my online American Literature II survey course. I divide the class of forty students into four groups. Each group is assigned its own questions, which all the students in that group must answer (i...