Hemingway's Short Story Research Articles

The effect of reading literary fiction on the theory of mind skills among persons with schizophrenia and normal controls.

Recent research data suggest that theory of mind (ToM) skills may improve after reading literary fiction. However, beside this short term favorable effect, regular long-term reading of literary fiction may also support ToM development or may improve ToM performance. The presence of impaired ToM abilities is well-documented in schizophrenia; however, the role of reading in these deficits is unknown. In the present study our aim was to assess the effect of prior reading experiences on theory of mind performance in patients with schizophrenia, and in healthy controls. ToM assessment was done with the Short Story Task, which is based on the interpretation of a Hemingway short story. After reading the short story, questions were asked in an interview format regarding comprehension, explicit and implicit ToM skills, then comparative analysis of schizophrenia patients was performed (n = 47) and matched to a normal control (n = 48) group concerning deficits of ToM abilities. Participants were also stratified according to their prior reading experiences. Previous reading experience was associated with better comprehension and explicit ToM performance both in patients with schizophrenia, and in healthy controls. However, the explicit ToM performance of patients with prior reading was still weaker compared to healthy controls with reading experiences. Path model analysis revealed that reading had a direct positive effect on ToM, and an indirect effect through improving comprehension. Prior reading experience is associated with better ToM performance not just in healthy controls but also in patients living with schizophrenia. Previous reading experience also improves comprehension, which in turn has a favorable impact on ToM. Our results support the idea that literary fiction reading may have a therapeutic potential in the rehabilitation of schizophrenia.

Pressure and Elegance: The Theme of Death in Hemingway's Short Stories

Pressure and Elegance: The Theme of Death in Hemingway's Short Stories

Hemingway's Short Stories: Reflections on Teaching, Reading, and Understanding ed. by Frederic J. Svoboda

Reviewed by: Hemingway's Short Stories: Reflections on Teaching, Reading, and Understanding ed. by Frederic J. Svoboda Ellen Andrews Knodt Hemingway's Short Stories: Reflections on Teaching, Reading, and Understanding. Edited by Frederic J. Svoboda, Kent UP, 2019. 144 pp. $24.95. A recent addition to the Teaching Hemingway series, Hemingway's Short Stories: Reflections on Teaching, Reading, and Understanding, edited by Frederic Svoboda, is a highly useful volume for high school and college instructors who often introduce students to Hemingway through one of his famous short stories. As Mark P. Ott mentions in his Foreword, the essays included here "revise our understanding not only of Hemingway but also how to refresh his work for students" (x). Building on the work of Paul Smith and Joseph J. Waldmeir, to whom the book is dedicated, Svoboda enlists leading literary critics to analyze thirteen Hemingway stories, several of which are frequently anthologized such as "Indian Camp"; "Big Two-Hearted River"; or "Hills Like White Elephants," and some that readers may not know as well, such as "Cross Country Snow" or "A Simple Enquiry." Essays model a variety of teaching practices and thematic focuses to enable close reading for high school, college, and technical school students. As Svoboda remarks, close reading is useful "for literary study in general—or even for any college course requiring attention to details" (xi). After Svoboda's introduction, Peter L. Hays begins the volume with the first short story from In Our Time, "First Things: Teaching 'Indian Camp.'" Focusing his approach to the story with undergraduate and graduate students, Hays takes readers through the main events in the story, posing questions aimed at eliciting the class's perceptions of the Native Americans, Dr. Adams, Nick (his young son), and Uncle George. Hays highlights often overlooked details of light imagery, the contrast in landscape at the beginning and end of the story, varying interpretations of Dr. Adams' comments, and the Native American husband's motive for his suicide. This first essay bodes well for the "hands on" advice for instructors in this collection. Several more essays focus on In Our Time selections, showcasing a variety of teaching techniques. Janice Byrne's essay "Hemingway's 'The End of Something' for High School Sophomores" features pre-reading activities about Hemingway's experiences in World War I, as a way of preparing them for Nick's break-up with Marjorie. Byrne follows the biographical detail with a two-minute writing activity about Nick and then Marjorie for individual students or small groups. Another option, according to Byrne, is to ask small [End Page 137] groups to consider the thematic images in the text, such as the past, love, or alienation. She also finds the setting of the demolished sawmill at the beginning of the story ripe for discussion. Byrne ends her essay with a number of post-discussion activities. Another take on how World War I affects a character is Judith Siegel Henn's essay "The Education of Harold Krebs, or Approaching Ernest Hemingway's 'Soldier's Home' with Engineering Students in Israel." Seeking information about her students' understanding of Hemingway in general and in their ease of understanding the story, Henn asks student to complete pre-reading questionnaires which she includes in the essay. Once students have read the story, Henn identifies dilemmas or problem areas in the story, such as the meaning of the photos at the beginning or Krebs' "disgust with duplicity," and asks small groups to analyze those areas before reporting to the class. Quoting from student papers, Henn marvels at how well the story invites "reading between the lines." Frederic Svoboda's contribution, "The Things That Nick Adams Carried to the 'Big Two-Hearted River,'" with an acknowledged link to Tim O'Brien's story and novel, demonstrates the realism of Nick Adams's fishing journey by physically demonstrating to his Michigan students that a 65-pound backpack can indeed account for every item mentioned in the story. Paired essays in the collection include two on "The Battler," also from In Our Time. These essays discuss the tricky issue of race in the story, focusing on the character of Bugs, the African-American "caretaker" of the white...

The Sins of the Fathers: Mental Illness, Heredity, and Short Fiction by Wharton and Hemingway

Abstract In Edith Wharton's 1903 novella Sanctuary and Ernest Hemingway's posthumously published short story “I Guess Everything Reminds You of Something,” both authors write about a parent worried about a child's tendency to plagiarize. In each case, the inherited propensity for immoral behavior stands in for the inherited bipolar disorder that affected both Wharton's husband, Teddy, and Hemingway himself. The authors implicitly evoke degeneration theory, an ugly offshoot of the pseudoscience of eugenics popular in early twentieth-century America, to explore the dangers of paternal inheritance. The negative eugenics widely accepted in America during the first half of the twentieth century would dictate that people with genetic mental illness should not be allowed to reproduce at all. Not surprisingly, the mother in Wharton's novella and the father in Hemingway's short story are each plagued by guilt over a son's immorality. In these critically neglected works of short fiction, a concerned parent broods over whether a child's hereditary propensities can be overcome by a loving upbringing and supportive environment. Both Wharton and Hemingway wrestled with bipolar disorder and its devastating symptoms in their own families and wrote stories in which they expressed personal and cultural anxieties about the illness's devastating impact.

Hemingway's Short Stories: Reflections on Teaching, Reading, and Understanding ed. by Frederic J. Svoboda (review)

Reviewed by: Hemingway's Short Stories: Reflections on Teaching, Reading, and Understanding ed. by Frederic J. Svoboda Joy Landeira Frederic J. Svoboda, ed. Hemingway's Short Stories: Reflections on Teaching, Reading, and Understanding. Kent State UP, 2019. 136p. "All you have to do is write one true sentence; write the truest sentence that you know," counselled Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast, his memories of 1920s Paris. Heeding his advice for truth telling, the truest sentence I can write about Kent State's "Teaching Hemingway" series is that it will make you want to teach and read Hemingway in new ways and in old ways, again and again. Boasting over nine volumes, the collection, edited by Mark P. [End Page 85] Ott and Susan F. Beegel, has been featured in our recent Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature book review sections of issues 73.2 and 74.1. This fitting testimony to the impact of the series and the significance of Hemingway for many RMMLA scholars also has an ulterior motive to pique your interest in preparation for our upcoming 2020 convention in October in Boulder, Colorado. The featured Keynote speaker will be Hemingway's great-granddaughter, Cristen Hemingway Jaynes, author of Ernest's Way: An International Journey through Hemingway's Life. The biography and travel guide explores the influence of the places where he lived and worked upon his life and writing. To encourage you and your students on your own journey through Hemingway's short stories, I enthusiastically recommend Editor Frederic J. Svoboda's newest volume in the series, Hemingway's Short Stories: Reflections on Teaching, Reading, and Understanding. Whether you are a veteran teacher who includes Hemingway in every syllabus or a reader who hasn't studied him since high school, these thirteen approachable essays by master teachers from secondary, post-secondary, and post-graduate levels will inspire you to return to the master storyteller once again. Several essays walk teachers through a typical—or not so typical—lesson and illustrate how to guide students through dialogue and details to elicit and incite their participation and critical thinking. For example, Peter Hays's lead essay "First Things, Teaching 'Indian Camp'" travels through the classic initiation tale of how a young Nick Adams watches his father Dr. Adams perform a cesarean operation late at night. Here, the importance of questioning techniques—not just what to ask, but when and how to pose them, and how to raise more questions, demonstrates how discussion unfolds and prompts continued debate. Careful, deep reading and attention to thematic and technical components address both touchy and touching subjects. Commentary and reflections about "The Battler" spark contemporary approaches to race relations in two timely articles by Marc Dudley and John Beall. Beall's suggestions for group free writing and Donald A. Daikor's use of pre-writing model teaching strategies that entice students to discover for themselves the importance of "story showing," not just story telling. Kinetic learners will literally jump out of their seats to heft [End Page 86] Frederic J. Svoboda's 60-plus-pound backpack filled with the list of supplies that Nick mentions in "Big Two-Hearted River." This clever realia and reality approach resonates with his students who are familiar with fishing and camping in upper Michigan. Another form of reality—Reality TV and the Discovery Channel—serves Patrick Bonds well for teaching "The Last Good Country" virtually and for stimulating students to write their own conclusions to the unfinished novella. Verna Kale solves real-time conundrums by having students perform texts. They experience palpable tension by reading the scene about a couple contemplating an abortion in "Hills Like White Elephants" out loud, acting out the motions, and duplicating the awkward pauses and prolonged silences of a 5-minute dialogue spread across a 35-minute wait for the train to arrive. Likewise, acting out the waiters' dialogue in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," illustrates the much-contested question about which one is speaking. An emphasis on writing—not just Hemingway's style, but on developing the student's own prowess—resurfaces throughout most of the essays, including up-to-date usage of digital resources and electronic databases to...

Sentence Length and Complexity in Hemingway's Short story : A Clean, Well-Lighted Place : A Stylistic study

The term style is somehow difficult to define . The difficulty arises from the fact that it is acquiring several interpretations . Such interpretations might refer to abstract notions such as " style of deviations " ; or " style is choice " or a distinct personality (the style of Shakespeare ) ; or to periods ( the baroque style ) and the like ( Galperine , 1977:11). 
 Carter and Nashe (1990:36) argue that style can be recognized because it stands out in one way or another from a standard . This view simply means style can be seen as deviation . However , such a view cannot be taken for granted since norms are very difficult to standardize . Wales (1990 ) [quoted in Missikova ,2003] in her famous book A Dictionary of Stylistics listed the most common characteristics of style as follows : 
 
 Style refers to the manner of expression in writing and speaking .
 Style can be seen as variation in language use , whether literary or non-literary . The term register is commonly used for such variations in linguistic features found in non-literary situations ,
 
 such as legal language , advertising , etc.
 
 Style is seen as distinctive of register , genre or period.
 Style is defined in terms of choice of items , and their distribution and
 
 patterning .
 As deviation from a norm , style is a concept that is used traditionally in literary stylistics , since literary language is more deviant than non-literary language use .
 To sum up , Warner (1961:1) ; Garvin (1964:112) go on to state that in spite of the different interpretations of the term style , the simplest interpretation is that is a manner of expressing one's thoughts and feelings in words .

Teaching Hemingway and Race ed. by Gary Holcomb

Reviewed by: Teaching Hemingway and Race ed. by Gary Holcomb Ian Marshall Teaching Hemingway and Race. Edited by Gary Holcomb. Kent UP, 2018, 248 pp. $35.00. In her seminal book, Race and Identity in Hemingway's Fiction, Amy L. Strong argues that "[o]pening the canon and recovering texts by women and people of color must happen concurrently with new readings of traditional texts" (13-14). Teaching Hemingway and Race has managed to do just that, deftly combining new readings of Hemingway's classic texts with lesser read ones and shedding new light on writers of color and the ways in which Hemingway influenced, and was influenced by them. The collection, edited by Gary Holcomb, follows in a line of books in the "Teaching Hemingway" series and is focused primarily on the subject of "race." As intimated in the Forward, written by the series editor, Mark, P. Ott, and noted in the introduction, written by Holcomb, the "collection intends to provide a practicable means for teaching the subject of race in Hemingway's writing and related texts, from how to approach ethnic, nonwhite international, and tribal characters to how to teach difficult questions of racial representation, without apology for Hemingway's sometimes troubling representation of race" (2). Its other objective is to "offer strategies to assist the instructor in teaching the contemporary student reader, trained to read through the multicultural studies lens, how to work through these troubling representations" (3). That this book tackles issues of race, racism, multiculturalism, and identity in the way that it does, makes it essential reading for anyone interested in twentieth century or contemporary American literature, as well as for anyone interested in how a study of literature might provide an opportunity for dialogue, across disparate political, cultural, racial, and ethnic lines. The first part of the book (the first six of the ten essays), as Holcomb points out, is dedicated to questions of pedagogy. The remaining four essays "considers Hemingway's work in conversation with writings by black authors" (3). These, in some ways, are reminiscent of Holcomb's Hemingway and the Black Renaissance collection. The first essay, "Reading Between the (Color) Lines: Teaching Race in Hemingway's 'The Battler'" by Marc Dudley, tackles the thorny issue of racist language in Hemingway's fiction head on. Dudley takes us through a series of pedagogical steps he employs to prepare his students to read what he readily identifies as a bizarre, yet brilliant and complex text. He concludes that, because Hemingway drew on an historical newspaper account and changed one of the people presented in that account from white to black, he made [End Page 110] "this story expressly about race" (10). Dudley asks his students to probe why Hemingway so aggressively uses racial epithets in this story, and ultimately suggests to them that it is "both a false flag and a deliberate directive by the writer" (12). The racist language, then, demonstrates Hemingway's complex use of contemporary attitudes toward racial representation, and shows Bugs as both unmistakably Black, yet also unmistakably controlling in the text. The second essay, "Teaching Hemingway Short Stories through the Lens of Critical Race Theory" by Margaret E. Wright-Cleveland is focused on Hemingway's In Our Time, and excellent pedagogical strategies for the teaching of it that probe deeply into the text and the author, and the student's engagement with both. The essay grounds In Our Time in an understanding of a "racial education" and uses essential ideas from Critical Race Theory to teach the constructedness of race. The pedagogy described in this essay asks students to consider how their own society constructs races, ethnicity, social class, and nation (17) and invites them to explore in a comparative way, Hemingway's Oak Park as his first racial context. "Hemingway's Experts: Teaching Race in Death in the Afternoon and Green Hills of Africa" by Ross K. Tangedal "presents a teaching approach for Hemingway's complex nonfiction texts with a critical eye toward the complication of race" (30). Tangedal argues that Hemingway's depiction of race through his "experts" Belmonte, the Zuritos, Droopy, and M'Cola asks critics and readers to address the development of racialized characters...

Teaching Culture and Its Effect on the Classroom Motivation of Korean EFL Students in a Reading Class

The purpose of this paper is to examine and compare the use of a standard textbook with the use of target language culture materials on student classroom motivation. Seven participants out of a class of 35 Korean university EFL students volunteered to participate in this study. This was a class in the skill of reading in English and met once a week for two hours, with one hour devoted to use of the textbook and another hour to studying cultural materials. These students engaged in interviews, diary entries, and were subjects of observation during one semester. Observation sheets were used to record students' on-task behavior, and also their overall class motivation as they used the textbook and the cultural materials, which consisted of three Hemingway short stories. Findings indicated five of the students were positively motivated to learn by the stories, and two students indicated a preference for the textbook. This study concludes with a discussion of classroom implications and study limitations.

Hemingway's Brain by Andrew Farah

Reviewed by: Hemingway's Brain by Andrew Farah Susan F. Beegel Hemingway's Brain. By Andrew Farah. Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, 2017. 194 pp. Cloth $24.99. Hemingway studies has waited a long time for the right physician to take an interest in the tragic central problem of Hemingway's life—his progressive mental unraveling, begun early and accelerating in the 1950s, and his final descent into severe depression and psychosis, culminating in one of the most famous suicides of the twentieth century. At last, the doctor is in. Andrew Farah is a Neuropsychiatrist, Chief of Psychiatry at the High Point Division of the University of North Carolina Healthcare System, and a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. His arrival is timely. Neuroscience, bolstered by technologies such as the PET scan, which uses radioactive tracers to show problems at the cellular level, is a rapidly advancing field with many new things to tell us. Farah's interest in Hemingway is not casual; his neuropsychiatric study is based on comprehensive research into the primary and secondary materials of Hemingway biography. The result, Hemingway's Brain, offers a "forensic psychiatric examination of his very brain cells—the stressors, traumas, chemical insults, and biological changes—that killed a world-famous literary genius" (1). [End Page 122] Farah's opening chapter, "Inheritance," reviews the well-known multigenerational history of depression and suicide in the Hemingway family. To this, he adds a valuable discussion about the stand-alone heritability of suicidal behavior (see pages 14-15). Identical twins sharing the same DNA are seventeen times more likely than fraternal twins to make a serious attempt at suicide if a co-twin has also done so at any time in his or her life. Adoptive studies of siblings separated and raised by different parents in different homes show that a genetic code for suicide operates independently of environment; the rate of suicide among biological siblings of adoptees who commit suicide is six times higher than the rate among siblings of non-suicidal adoptees. "The genetic risk of a suicidal tendency can be transmitted completely independent of the genes for mental illness," Farah tells us. "The predetermined vulnerability for self-destruction is… independent of the genetic risk for depression, bipolar illness, substance abuse, or any other psychiatric disorder." In other words, Hemingway may have carried a genetic code for suicidal behavior, "its own potential time bomb." We do not need to seek a mental illness that explains not only his suicide, but those of his father, two siblings, and granddaughter. Instead, Farah's extremely convincing diagnosis of Hemingway's mental decline is "dementia, mixed etiology" with recurrent depression, and psychosis secondary to both (159). That "mixed etiology" includes three major contributors. Farah looks first at Hemingway's history of at least nine serious concussions, from the blast of that Austrian mortar in a World War I trench to the final African plane crash, with every falling skylight, car accident, and slip-and-fall from Pilar's flying bridge in between. Farah then offers a detailed discussion of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE (see pages 38-40). While some patients recover fully from a concussion, or continue with minor impairment, others develop CTE, a form of progressive brain degeneration that can result from major concussive injuries or from multiple minor or "sub-threshold" brain traumas. First known as dementia pugilistica, the syndrome of the "punch-drunk" boxer (Ad Francis in Hemingway's short story "The Battler" is a fine example), CTE garnered headlines during the NFL's 2013 "Concussion Crisis," when the organization awarded $765 million to former players with head injuries. Farah offers a devastating list of how CTE causes progressive dementia and other neurological problems—damage to the blood-brain barrier that protects the brain from neurotoxins, damage to the blood vessels supplying the brain, disruption of brain cell membranes blocking the entry of cell-destroying calcium, atrophy of brain structures, inflammation, the release [End Page 123] of chemical messengers called cytokines, and a phenomenon known as "apoptosis," a form of DNA damage that can actually reprogram brain cells for premature death. Add alcoholism and stir. For instance, Hemingway, in a World...

The Hemingway Short Story: A Study in Craft for Writers and Readers by Robert Paul Lamb (review)

The Hemingway Short Story: A Study in Craft for Writers and Readers by Robert Paul Lamb (review)

The Hemingway short story: a study in craft for writers and readers

In The Hemingway Short Story: A Study in Craft for Writers and Readers, Robert Paul Lamb delivers a dazzling analysis of the craft of this influential writer. Lamb scrutinizes a selection of Hemingway's exemplary stories to illuminate the author's methods of construction and to show how craft criticism complements and enhances cultural literary studies. The Hemingway Short Story, the highly anticipated sequel to Lamb's critically acclaimed Art Matters: Hemingway, Craft, and the Creation of the Modern Short Story, reconciles the creative writer's focus on art with the concerns of cultural critics, establishing the value that craft criticism holds for all readers. Beautifully written in clear and engaging prose, Lamb's study presents close readings of representative Hemingway stories such as Soldier's Home, A Canary for One, God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen, and Big Two-Hearted River. Lamb's examination of Indian Camp, for instance, explores not only its biographical contexts -- showing how details, incidents, and characters developed in the writer's mind and notebook as he transmuted life into art -- but also its original, deleted opening and the final text of the story, uncovering otherwise unseen aspects of technique and new terrains of meaning. Lamb proves that a writer is not merely a site upon which cultural forces contend, but a professional in his or her craft who makes countless conscious decisions in creating a literary text. Revealing how the short story operates as a distinct literary genre, Lamb provides the meticulous readings that the form demands -- showing Hemingway practicing his craft, offering new inclusive interpretations of much debated stories, reevaluating critically neglected stories, analyzing how craft is inextricably entwined with a story's cultural representations, and demonstrating the many ways in which careful examinations of stories reward us.

Queering Sexual Practices in "Mr. and Mrs. Eliot

According to Gayle Rubin in "Thinking Sex," sexual values—like other value systems surrounding race, ethnicity, and religion—form hierarchical binaries that counterpose a privileged term residing within a charmed circle against a degraded other residing outside, thereby articulating an imaginary line of difference and implied divergence. The sexual hierarchy is generally constructed from the point of view of heterosexism. From its opening sentence, Ernest Hemingway's short story "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot" establishes reproductive sexual practice within the context of marriage as a central frame of reference: "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot tried very hard to have a baby" (CSS 123). This essay will pursue the meaning and effect of Hemingway's emphasis, considering Hubert and Cornelia's presumed erotic practices with reference to Rubin's critical elucidation of a good sex/bad sex hierarchy.

A cross-cultural analysis of Hemingway’s Cat in the Rain for the Iranian EFL context

IntroductionTeachers of English as a foreign language must be aware of the wide array of variables involved in the selection of texts which are to be presented in the classroom. Often this selection process is approached from a linguistic point of view. However, it is vital to consider the text from the perspective of the discourse analyst, especially given the cross-cultural differences seen in the EFL setting, which could easily result in misinterpretation on the part of the reader. It is also of utmost importance for teachers to be aware of the suppressing and/or liberating effects any given text may have on their learners.The present study aims to determine whether Ernest Hemingway's short story Cat in the Rain is suitable for being taught in the Iranian EFL context, as well as detecting the issues and difficulties which may accompany its use. With this purpose in mind, a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of the short story was undertaken.Through CDA, we seek to expound on the thematic messages conveyed by the short story. Our study will be aided by occasional references made to other works by Hemingway, and will analyze the rhetorical devices employed by the author both in general and in the short story at hand.Critical Discourse AnalysisLed by Fairclough, Wodak and van Dijk, among others (Wodak & Meyer 2001), the field of CDA attempts to uncover the manipulation and dominance of society by those in power. The relevance of CDA, however, extends to any given means of influence even literary means. According to Fairclough (1995), power is described in terms of asymmetries between participants in discourse events and the capacity to control how texts are produced, distributed and consumed...in particular social contexts (p.1). To him, all features of discourse are potentially ideological, and texture (the form and organization of a text, not just its contents) is an extraordinarily sensitive indicator of sociocultural processes, relations and change (p.4). He discusses the 'orderliness' and 'naturalisation' of state-produced 'autonomous subjects' (although 'state' is used interchangeably with any 'group' or 'culture'), shaped to integrate and be 'competent, non-resistant' participants in society (p.27). Fairclough (1992), in his seminal work Discourse and Social Change, attempts to create a model of textually based discourse analysis, and includes group and personal 'ethos' in the equation. However, criticisms of CDA include its overtly political, potentially contentious nature (Kress 1990); its inclination to be reductionistic and deterministic (Pennycook 1994); and its proponents' tendency to remain uncritical of themselves (Widdowson 1998).The central goal of CDA is to highlight the use of language in the unequal maintenance of power and control over people (Fairclough 1995; Wodak 2001). Therefore, it is primarily an endeavor of social awareness and emancipation through analysis of spoken or written texts, with the aim of uncovering specific ideology, often implicitly portrayed by the author. As such, and despite the various approaches advocated by the forerunners in CDA development (see Meyer, 2001:15-16), CDA assumes the importance of both a historical and contemporary discourse context, and demonstrates its interdisciplinary nature. In addition, CDA includes analysis of interdiscursive and intertextual relationships, distinct from other methods.Attempting to explain how conversations in texts can be critically analyzed, Fairclough (1995) and Kress (1990) point out that one should observe whether communicative interaction is evenly or unevenly distributed. In other words, whether one person dominates the communicative event in any situation/ conversation or there is an active sharing of conversational turn-takings. They suggest that one should examine whether individuals are placed in the subjected position in institutional interaction or are allowed to be active participants in dialogue. …

Ernest Hemingway's Miltonic Twist in "Up in Michigan"

Interpretations of Hemingway's short story "Up in Michigan" have been divided about the meaning of the unsettling sexual encounter between Jim Gilmore and Liz Coates. This essay re-examines the story's conclusion through the lens of literary influence and contends that John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost may hold important clues to the story's interpretation. "Up in Michigan" provides a Miltonic twist on the fortunate fall, and demonstrates Hemingway's own recasting of the Eden legend.

An Ethics and an Aesthetics of Interviewing

My decision to interview independent filmmakers as a central dimension of my research came as the conclusion of a long wrestle with the question of how I could best serve my field. By the time I was finished with graduate school (I received my PhD in English from the University of Florida in 1970; my focus was American literature during the period from Gertrude Stein through Richard Wright; my dissertation was Narrative Perspective in the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway), I was dubious about the value of scholarship, at least to the extent that scholarship was written criticism of authors' works. I know this will sound arrogant, but having read all the scholarship I could find on narrative perspective in fiction and on Hemingway's short stories and novels-it took the better part of a year-I came to feel that my time would have been better spent had I simply reread Hemingway and/or had broadened my experience of modern fiction. Publish or perish had already become an academic mantra, and it seemed to me that the function of most of what was published, at least on Hemingway, had less to do with discovering new insights into his work than with climbing the academic ladder toward financial security and social status. Especially to a young man rebelling against the values of suburban America, this did not sound like a particularly worthy goal. By the time I finished my graduate work, I had become fascinated with film history (an interest shared by many English PhDs of my generation), as well as with literature, and had taught a basic film course during my final semester at Florida. Once I was lucky enough to find a teaching job (at Utica College of Syracuse University) that allowed me to offer courses in both fields, I tried to forget about publishing or perishing, so that I could focus on my teaching. While I felt reasonably comfortable with the American literature courses I was assigned during those early semesters, I struggled to understand what films to teach and how to teach them. Like many of my colleagues who began teaching film without having had the opportunity to study it in any organized academic context, I was desperately trying to learn enough about film history to feel comfortable teaching in this new discipline. My desperation led me to any and every film event I could discover in the Central New York area, and especially to the Cinema Studies Department at what had just become the State University of New York at Binghamton (it had been Harpur College), where Larry Gottheim had established a beachhead for avant-garde film

Hemingway and Guy Hickok in Italy: The Brooklyn Eagle Articles

In March 1927 Hemingway and his journalist friend Guy Hickok made a trip to northern Italy that became the basis for Hemingway's short story "Che Ti Dice La Patria?" Hickok wrote at least two articles about the Italian jaunt for The Brooklyn Eagle: "Ezra Pound, American Author, Now in Genoa, Has Regular Bathtub and Charming Wife" and "Mussolini's Fascist Militia Good to Look at, but Make Botch of Guarding Crossings." The articles are introduced and reprinted here.

Reading the Writer's Craft: The Hemingway Short Stories

Reading the Writer's Craft: The Hemingway Short Stories

The Pastoral and the City in Carl Franklin's "One False Move"

American film depicts city as dark and labyrinthine as the fate of its protagonists, but the promise of rus in urbe is often present, hinting of possible way out. Bisbee, Arizona, in L.A. Confidential (1997), the miniature village and tabletop electric trains in Clockers (1997), the sunlit pier and ocean in Dark City (1998), the deus ex machina conclusion of Blade Runner (1982)--all suggest an escape from the urban maze. But as general rule the pastoral within the urban context of film is almost always treated ironically, as the grim ending of Seven (1995) illustrates. This pattern is fairly consistent: Dix Handley in The Asphalt Jungle (1950) dies in horse pasture when he tries to return to his boyhood farm in Kentucky; Jeff Markham in Out of the Past (1947) loses his idealized small town (and the golden girl within it) when the false pastoral in Mexico catches up with him; and in the first movie version of Hemingway's short story, The Killers (1946), the city invades the country, implying that in twentieth-century America there is no longer any place to hide. In One False Move (1991), African American director Carl Franklin uses the pastoral motif within film in unique way, one that has ties to African American cinematic and literary traditions. In Franklin's extraordinary film, the pastoral becomes the site of primal crime, as it does in Oscar Micheaux's Within Our Gates (1920) and John Singleton's Boyz N the Hood (1991). In Singleton's film about contemporary L.A., we remember the chilling moment when the eerie quiet of the black urban neighborhood is bathed in menacing, pastoral sunlight. Although this scene is indebted to Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974), its effect expresses distinctly African American theme. Polanski's sunshine noir traces the primal crime back to American greed, specifically to the theft of the Owens Valley water. Singleton's pastoral moment suggests that the snake in the urban landscape is the legacy of slavery. His scene gives special poignancy to Julian Murphet's recent argument that film noir, especially the films of the 1940s, is often about noirs (Murphet 24-35). Franklin's technicolor thriller goes step further than Singleton's work in that the urban crime occurs in the film's opening scenes, but its explicit origins lie in the American South and, by extension, in the history of the Republic itself. (1) F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) eloquently links our nation's origins with the pastoral impulse. Nick Carraway, we remember, imagines time when Long Island first flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes--a fresh, of the new world (189). Yet in Fitzgerald's novel, the pastoral contains within it the seeds of its uncanny opposite, for the attempt to escape or transcend history inevitably triggers its return. Gatsby's ghostly heart (101) yearns to recapture past unencumbered by mutability, but that imagined past is itself corrupted by history, indeed by those very Dutch whose desires for Paradise cannot escape the carnality of the Incarnation. The New World soon undergoes series of transformations, from trading port called New Amsterdam, to the modern metropolis of New York, to the old money of East Egg and the fast money of West Egg, in which pastoral innocence shrinks to the deadly dimensions of Gatsby's swimming pool. As the ending of Gatsby reminds us, the enchantment of the New World's green breast also pandered in whispers to the basest of human desires, thereby bringing the first Dutch slave ship to Paradise in 1619. Perhaps that African presence is hinted at in Nick's memory of the East as a night scene by El Greco: hundred houses at once conventional and grotesque (185) and in the link Tom Buchanan continually makes between Gatsby and African Americans (137, 138). Nevertheless, Fitzgerald seems to have it both ways: If the past is corrupted by the slave ship, it also exists without corruption in Nick's memory of the Middle West--the Union station at Christmas time, the train home to the small towns of Wisconsin and Minnesota when he and his friends were unutterably aware of our identity with this country before we melted indistinguishably into it again (184). …

Hemingway's "Francis Macomber" in Pirandellian and Freudian Perspectives

Ernest Hemingway's Short Happy Life of (1936) is one of his finest stories. The author counted it among his best achievements, and a great number of critical readings have shown it to be a text that is supremely characteristic of Hemingway's style as well as of his subject matter, themes and preoccupations. It gives us in terse dialogue and graphic narrative, mostly from the two male characters' viewpoints, the East African setting, the safari, the action scenes, and, above all, the emotional crisis that comes to a head among the main participants. Critical discussion has centered chiefly around the ending (murder or accident?) and the evaluation of the three major characters, Robert Wilson (admirable or brutish?), Macomber (initiate to true heroism or sham virility?) and Margaret Macomber (hateful or pitiable?). (1) Other critical preoccupations have included aspects of colonialism, Hemingway's misogyny, or smaller points like the significance of the guns mentioned in the text, of the Shakespeare quotation (serious or ironical?), or the meaning of four-letter man (the c-word, of course). This essay approaches the text from two diametrically opposed angles. First it takes up the philological question of Hemingway's sources, and then it tries to supplement former readings by a psychoanalytically guided interpretation of the tale's psychodynamic deep-structure, its phantasmal scenario of early-childhood affects and object relations, in the aim of clarifying the literary profile of the story and referring it to broader psycho-cultural contexts. The quest for the sources of Hemingway's tale has hitherto been only partly successful. Biographical parallels seem to be more apparent than literary analogues. Francis is a work of fiction, but was clearly triggered off by stories and situations encountered at the African safari undertaken by Hemingway and his wife in 1933-34 (described in Green Hills of Africa, 1935). Philip Percival, the white hunter and guide of the party, is recognizable in Robert Wilson to a certain extent, although Wilson's role is less friendly and humorous than Pop's part in Green Hills of Africa. The author's strained feelings about his rich wife, Pauline Pfeiffer--they split up soon after--can be found in the depiction of Margot Macomber as a typical bitch. (The theme is also present, as is well known, in Snows of Kilimanjaro, 1936.) Margot's biting dialogue sounds different, though, from Poor Old Mama's solicitous, cheerful talk in Green Hills. Robert Wilson's clipped manner of speech, packed with Briticisms, seems partially to go back to a British infantry officer, Eric Dorman-Smith, whom Hemingway had met and admired as a young man. (2) Wilson and Macomber are, of course, also projections of Hemingway's ambivalent self-fantasies, his own particular idealizations and anxieties. Other historical persons behind the characters include the attractive Jane Mason (Hemingway's occasional lover and sportsfellow of the mid-thirties) as well as an anonymous nice jerk to whom Hemingway referred enigmatically more than twenty years after the completion of the story. (3) The ending of the narrative has historical model. Philip Percival, who had mentioned to Hemingway instances of sexual contacts between some colleagues of his and their female clients, remarked drily that to his knowledge no client has ever succeeded in shooting her husband as EH describes. (4) The literary analogues so far mentioned by critics are of a more general kind. Philip Young pointed out that Stephen Crane's novel The Red Badge of Courage (1895), one of Hemingway's favourite texts, relates, as does Hemingway's short story, a young man's passage from fear to courage. (5) Other suggested parallels include Stewart Edward White's The Land of Footprints (1912), a book Hemingway had read, which describes hunting in Africa in terms comparable to Macomber, and Leo Tolstoy's novella Death of Ivan Illich (1886), which centres around a loveless marriage and the maturation of the eponymous character. …

"Hills Like White Elephants": The Jilting of Jig

This essay examines different scholarly interpretations of the ending of Hemingway's short story "Hills Like White Elephants," and suggests a different outcome from those so far considered--the girl will indeed have the abortion, expecting in this way to stay on with the man, but after the operation has been performed, he will abandon her. Various verbal and non-verbal indications found in the story support this interpretation of the narrative, as does the very symbolism of the title itself.