IDS 2676 Spring 2023 Wright

Ernest Hemingway has held a place in the American Literary Canon and been a recognized American icon for nearly one hundred years. His books have never been out of print; many novels have been made into movies; his face was on the cover of Life, Time, and Newsweek magazines multiple times; he won the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes. Nearly 100 years after his first book was published in the United States his writing is still assigned in secondary schools and colleges and his name synonymous with American writing and white masculinity.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Feminist scholars addressed Hemingway’s characters and found strong, independent women. In the 2000s, some scholars have addressed how Hemingway presented race because Hemingway wrote Native American, African American, Jewish, African, Italian, Spanish, Irish, and Cuban characters. However, the vast majority of Hemingway’s characters are white American men. This course will ask students to consider the following question: What does Hemingway’s writing show about the state of white, American men post WWI and what difference does that make today?