Teaching Hemingway and Modernism ed. by Joseph Fruscione

Abstract

Reviewed by: Teaching Hemingway and Modernism ed. by Joseph Fruscione Michael Von Cannon Teaching Hemingway and Modernism. Ed. Joseph Fruscione. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 2015. 240 pp. Paper $40.00. As part of the "Teaching Hemingway" series, Joseph Fruscione's essay collection Teaching Hemingway and Modernism follows Lisa Tyler's Teaching Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and Peter L. Hays's Teaching Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (2008) and precedes Alex Vernon's Teaching Hemingway and War (2016), Verna Kale's Teaching Hemingway and Gender (2016) and Kevin Maier's soon-to-be-published Teaching Hemingway and the Natural World (2017). In the forward to Fruscione's volume, Mark P. Ott notes the rationale for shifting away from specific novels and toward broader concepts: "To promote their usefulness to instructors and professors—from high schools, community colleges, and universities—the newest volumes in this series are organized thematically rather than around a single text." In the introduction and the fifteen pedagogically oriented essays that follow, the volume explores Hemingway and the "theme" of modernism through three sections on significant people, places, and cultural and theoretical contexts. Written by teacher-scholars—ranging from tenured faculty to adjuncts, from university administrators to cofounders of nonprofit organizations—these essays discuss the relationship between Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, William Faulkner, and Zora Neale Hurston; the writer's rootedness to places such as Paris and Spain; and contexts including avant-garde art, warfare, postmodernism, and the digital age. Most importantly, contributors not only exhibit cutting-edge research but also stress innovative teaching practices both within and outside the traditional classroom setting. In the first section, contributors show how Hemingway's ostensible simplicity can help students decipher works by notoriously difficult modernist writers while, at the same time, deepening our appreciation of Hemingway's own complexity. Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick and Katie Owens-Murphy each compare Stein's portraits and narratives (e.g. "Picasso," Three Lives, and The Making of Americans) to In Our Time and Death in the Afternoon, contending that the juxtaposition provides access to stylistic similarities, specifically the writers' uses of repetition and elision. Likewise, Phillip Beard argues that "Big Two-Hearted River" and To Have and Have Not can help students understand Stevens's poetics of "extraordinary actuality" and, in turn, Hemingway's ecological understanding. James B. Carothers brings readers into his Hemingway and Faulkner undergraduate classroom, delving into the assigned reading list, class discussions (such as those on similarities between "The Short Happy [End Page 135] Life of Francis Macomber" and "A Rose for Emily"), essay prompts, and exam questions. For instance, Carothers warns against assignments or essay questions on the problematic Hemingway code; however, he does usefully suggest, "What you can do is ask students to consider the differences between the hero, the protagonist, and the central character, since the modern world that Hemingway and Faulkner confronted did not offer the heroic opportunity" (44). Most striking, Anna Lillios outlines her American Literature II unit on Hemingway and Hurston, in which she provides a day-by-day plan for The Sun Also Rises and Their Eyes Were Watching God. Like Carothers, she also offers suggestions for class discussions and essays that explore the gender and race dimensions of these modernist pilgrimage novels. Not surprisingly, the majority of essays in the second section (on place) center on Hemingway's Paris. Beginning with an immersive tour of her study-abroad course on American expatriate writers, Meg Gillette insightfully demonstrates how visits to museums (such as the Museum of Jewish Art and History, the Anthropology Museum, and the Musée d'Orsay) and other city sites—including statues, monuments, and memorials—help students examine the race, ethnicity, and gender in The Sun Also Rises, a novel that starts to read like a kind of postwar travelogue. She also helpfully offers tips for constructing a course with similar learning objectives but without the study-abroad requirement. Adam R. McKee focuses on the influence of Stein, James Joyce, and Paul Cézanne on the young writer's Paris-based experimentation, whereas David Barnes traces Ezra Pound's influence in order to recapture the political and socioeconomic aspects of In Our Time and...