Hemingway in the Digital Age: Reflections on Teaching, Reading, and Understanding ed. by Laura Godfrey

Abstract

Reviewed by: Hemingway in the Digital Age: Reflections on Teaching, Reading, and Understanding ed. by Laura Godfrey John Carroll Hemingway in the Digital Age: Reflections on Teaching, Reading, and Understanding. Edited by Laura Godfrey. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 2019. pp. 232. $.34.95. Ernest Hemingway’s stories have been taught in English classrooms for decades as a staple of any literary curriculum, but the scene of academia has shifted significantly in recent years. With Hemingway in the Digital Age: Reflections on Teaching, Reading, and Understanding, a collection of essays from a wide range of educators, Laura Godfrey aims to situate Hemingway’s works in [End Page 138] an age of electronic plentitude when easy access to information can be at best a distraction from attentive reading and at worst a rabbit’s hole of misinformation for a budding scholar. The running questions in all of these essays are: what can twenty-first century students glean from the works of Hemingway and by which methods can instructors lead them to such discoveries? Godfrey and her colleagues explore how educators can open a student’s mind to the depths of Hemingway’s writing in an age that sometimes feels as if it has lost its appreciation for the written word. Godfrey offers these articles as tools to help educators integrate Hemingway in this digital age. Mark Ott’s insightful foreword and Godfrey’s astute introduction prepare the readers for the collection as an exploration of the ways in which current-day educators present Hemingway to their students; there is a special emphasis on using technology to immerse students in the “physical environments” that Hemingway so painstakingly portrays in his work. After all, current students exist in a slick technological age starkly contrasted with the rugged physicality that Hemingway’s work glorifies. In an artificially small world lit by electric candlelight and an almost-fear of the primitive nature that surrounds us, the need for engaging with Hemingway and his work has arguably never been greater. The first section of the book is aptly titled Virtual Hemingways. Lisa Tyler contributes the first essay, “Virtual Papa,” which focuses on the multifaceted, and at times invalid, impressions of Ernest Hemingway that students encounter online. She reminds readers that in one form or another, Hemingway is a known entity for most students and argues for the use of a credible academic database to provide accurate information. Michael Steinberg and Jordan Cis-sell’s “Beyond the Photographs” share how their approach to Hemingway in an environmental literature course encourages students to explore the ecological (and social) shifts that were happening during the author’s lifetime. This objectivity allows the student to fully engage with the assigned material and better understand Hemingway’s impact outside the world of literature. Kirk Curnutt rounds out this first section with his essay, “A Meme-able Feast.” Like the other contributing authors, Curnutt feels compelled to “prove that literature has relevance outside the classroom” (33). Without relevance, excellent literature can be rejected, misconstrued, and even abandoned all together. Despite a somewhat dated idea—at least from a 21st century student’s perspective, of “memes,” Curnutt provides a valuable suggestion when he argues that decontextualizing Hemingway’s work makes his themes universally relevant [End Page 139] and easily understood by his students. He encourages the use of “memes” over other visual aids such as YouTube and PowerPoint specifically because of this decontextualization. This humanizes Hemingway by breaking the boundary between him and younger students, while putting them at ease with the relatively daunting analysis that a thorough investigation of his work commands. The second section of the book is entitled Hemingway for Digiphiles. Brian Croxall’s “How Not to Read Hemingway” encourages the use of a tool like Voyant to break up the traditional “read, analyze, write” objectives in English curricula. This leads to exploration of both the text and the technology itself, suggesting that an integrative approach to Hemingway is more appropriate for the current interdisciplinary approaches celebrated in academia. His cunningly titled article follows his class as they do not traditionally read Hemingway—rather they manually upload his work to their school’s digital archive and have a computer...