Monday, July 22, 2024

July 22, 2024: Revisiting the Canon: Ernest Hemingway

[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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