Hemingway in the Digital Age by Godfrey Laura;

Author:Godfrey, Laura;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Kent State University Press

Digital Resources for

Teaching Hemingway

Using Digital Mapping to Locate Students in Hemingway’s World

Richard Hancuff

Ernest Hemingway’s body of work often reads as inseparable from the locations in which he either produced or set those works. His prominent associations with the places he lived (Oak Park, Paris, Key West, Cuba, and Idaho) or wrote extensively about (Spain and Africa, most notably) inform both the serious criticism of his work and the cultural tourism that has sprung up around the writer, from Robert Gajdusek’s Hemingway’s Paris (1978) to the “Hemingway Look-Alike Contest” held annually at Sloppy Joe’s bar in Key West. As Laura Godfrey pointed out in 2006, “critical discussion of Hemingway’s sense of place is no new enterprise, and what we may call ‘place-centered’ criticism of his work continues to be an active field of discussion” (48). As one of those places, Paris stands out perhaps most in Hemingway lore in large part because of his posthumously published A Moveable Feast, which brought back for an audience immersed in the latter day “Papa” Hemingway the Hemingway of youthful struggle and the era of expatriate American Modernism. As George Wickes asserts, “Paris always remained his favorite city,” and through The Sun Also Rises (1925) and A Moveable Feast (1964) Hemingway crafted an image of the city as it was in the years following the First World War (167). Certainly, Hemingway’s first successes as a writer occur in Paris, and if we are to believe some criticism, the “best relationship of his life was with Hadley,” his first wife, and so Paris was not simply the city, but also the space of his memory so important to the aging writer’s sense of both his literary and romantic accomplishments (Dearborn 590). In his mean-spirited reminiscence of friend and rival F. Scott Fitzgerald in A Moveable Feast, Hemingway lauded the city as “the town best organized for a writer to write in that there is” (156). Hemingway does not elaborate on what that organization entails or how it works.

Regardless of Ernest Hemingway’s late 1950s reminiscences, Paris had seen another massive war and a midcentury rebuilding that changed its streets and cafes as well as its commercial life far from the sketches Hemingway conjured in A Moveable Feast. While Robert Gajdusek’s 1978 declaration that “the Paris of Hemingway’s youth is considerably transformed” speaks to the physical changes in the city, more recently critics have pointed out that Hemingway’s places are bound up not only in their physical features, but also in the individual’s experience and memory (9). In their edited collection Ernest Hemingway and the Geography of Memory (2010), Mark Cirino and Mark Ott note that “Hemingway’s work reverberates with a continual blend of memory, geography, and lessons of life revealed through the trauma of experience” (xiv). Similarly, Laura Godfrey elaborates in Hemingway’s Geographies (2016) that “any of the geographical, physical locations that he spends time describing in the text of the memoir, are for Hemingway all constructs built by memory and experience, places built out of the feelings evoked from those memories and experiences” (109).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.