[This past weekend we celebrated Ernest Hemingway’s 125th birthday. While I’ve been very glad to do my part to diversify our curricula way beyond the canon, I also believe there are still lots of valuable AmericanStudies reasons to read canonical authors. So this week I’ll make that case for Hemingway and four other canonized folks!]
Three
Hemingway short stories that remind us of both his genius and his relevance.
1)
“A
Clean, Well-Lighted Place” (1933): I said most of what I’d want to say
about this stunning story in this
post more than a decade ago. Here I’ll add that the publication date is
telling—by 1933 the success of novels like The Sun Also Rises (1926) and
A
Farewell to Arms (1929) had fully established Hemingway’s literary
cred, but he was still crafting some of the era’s most perfect short stories.
2)
“Big
Two-Hearted River” (1925): Before those novels, Hemingway began his career
with the masterful short story cycle In
Our Time (1925), a book that grapples with the effects of war and its
traumas just as potently as does the more famous (and also great) The
Things They Carried. “Big Two-Hearted River,” the book’s concluding
story, works best as part of that cycle; but even on its own terms, it’s a
strikingly beautiful story that exemplifies Hemingway’s “iceberg theory.”
3)
“Hills
like White Elephants” (1927): “Hills” is the Hemingway story that really
puts this post and week’s thesis to the test, as it’s so thoroughly canonized
that virtually every high school student reads it at some point (it’s one of
the couple texts I teach that I can assume almost every student of mine has
previously encountered). But here’s the thing—I’ve read literally hundreds of
papers on “Hills” over the years, and I’m still seeing new layers thanks to
that student work. It’s a formally unique work that challenges our
understanding of what a short story is and does, yet at the same time opens up
some of our most familiar and shared themes of relationships, communication,
identity, and more. I don’t know that short stories get better, and I don’t
think there’s a better case for still reading Hemingway’s.
Next
CanonStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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