Teaching Hemingway: Selected Short Stories

Ernest Hemingway may no longer be revered as he once was, but he remains among the most influential of twentieth-century American writers. In this seminar, we will try to rediscover the qualities that made Hemingway so important. What was it about his prose and narrative style, his ideas about art and experience, his view of the relation between literature and commercial society, his way of depicting suffering, trauma and dignity, that made him in some ways the premier American writer of literary fiction in the twentieth century? Our focus will be on several of the major short stories, including, "In Another Country,” "The Killers,” "The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” and "Hills Like White Elephants."