ENGL 419B - Hemingway: The Man and the Myth

Credits: (3)
Ernest Hemingway has come to embody a dizzying array of (contradictory) meanings for America: the “man’s man,” the tortured genius, the misogynist, the articulate representative of a “lost generation.” In this course we’ll be exploring the myths, the man, and his writing through historical, biographical, and literary criticism. In what ways does Hemingway–his life and his art–represent the shift from Victorian to modern world views? How does his innovative and influential writing style both reflect and shape that newly emerging modern consciousness? Despite his personal flaws, Hemingway believed that, as Miranda Mellis puts it, writers write “not, finally, to reduce experience to a formula, but rather to convert confusion into curiosity, to face questions that don’t have easy answers, and to create spaces in which others, be they students or readers, might do the same.”