The Role of Place in Literature

Short Conference Presentation w/o Works Cited Presented in 2014 at the Bavarian American Academy Summer Workshop in San Marcos, TX

The New Hemingway Studies, 2020

Whether unpacked as adjectives or nouns, metaphors like "American" are not wholly foundational, but they have consequence, shaping (often constricting) avenues of thought and critical practice. Some emerging directions in Hemingway Studies hinge on similar inquiries, like "What makes an American 'American'?" or "What makes a person who emigrated from the United States 'American'?" Such studies offer many new exciting perspectives to interpret Hemingway's writing as well as his biography. The question "Was Ernest Hemingway American?" conflates several inquiries: "Which identities did he perform?" "In what contexts were they engaged?" "How did his contemporaries perceive him?" "How did emigration influence his emotional experiences?" "In reference to whom did he use the pronoun-'we'?" "What contemporary ethnocultural categories does he fit?" "What languages did he speak on a consistent basis?" As cultural performance and language have inextricable links to a person's sense of being, these questions offer depths that scholars have yet to examine with much detail; they also provide some nuance to the monocultural, unhyphenated-American biases that often permeate Hemingway studies. Stemming in part from inquiries like these, in recent years a rich corpus of scholarship has examined the role of movement, migration, language, distance, and multilingual and transcultural life in Hemingway's creative process. These efforts have brought Hemingway studies into contact with social traditions he performed in Europe and Cuba, and elsewhere, and have afforded renewed appreciation of the contexts that inform Hemingway and his work.

Hemingway’s modernist expatriate mentor, Gertrude Stein, writing in An American in France (1936) famously wrote “American is my country, and Paris is my home town.” This paper explores the degree to which Paris served as home or hometown for Hemingway—from the time he resided there to his relocation to other “homes.” Was Paris a home away from the Oak Park, Illinois home he could never go back to? The way Hemingway writes about the concept and feeling and place of “home” echo the strange associations found in the heimlich-unheimlich that Freud explains in his essay on “The Uncanny”? According to Krebs in “A Soldier’s Home” (1925), “‘you can never go home again’.” Krebs echoes a feeling shaped by Hemingway’s own experience upon returning “home” to Oak Park after recovering from an injury he sustained as an ambulance driver in Italy. The idea that “you can never home home again,” doesn’t necessarily mean that Hemingway didn’t believe one could not find and return—either physically or imaginatively—to a place that felt like home, a place that felt familiar and comfortable. Ironically, it is the familiar, but the foreign, exotic, and remote places that Hemingway felt were more like home than his boyhood home. Later in his life, Hemingway reportedly told his friend A.E. Hotchner, "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast" (quoted in A Moveable Feast xii). This suggests that home, for Hemingway, is both a physical place and a set of associations, memories, and feelings about a place that make it somehow transportable. In Green Hills of Africa (1935), Hemingway writes about East Africa, where he and his second wife, Pauline, went on safari in 1933: “I loved this country and where a man feels at home, outside of where he’s born, is where he’s meant to go” (283-84). Hemingway traveled again to Africa to go on safari a second time with his fourth wife, Mary, during the winter of 1953-54 (part of which is recounted in his posthumously published novel True at First Light). Home, here, is associated with a place, regardless of its foreignness or remoteness, that imparts a feeling that is seemingly part calling and part fate. To understand these connections, strange and familiar, between Hemingway and home, we might ask whether and to what extent the moveable feast that Hemingway called Paris, his home from 1921-1928, remained with him throughout his life as he traveled, relocated to, and wrote about foreign and remote places that either he or his characters called home: Kenya, Key West, Cuba, and Idaho. I connect how Hemingway wrote about the idea of "home" with Freud's uncanny by first juxtaposing Oak Park (the heimlich and familiar, become unheimlich and unfamiliar) with Paris (the unheimlich foreign and unfamiliar become heimlich and familiar), and then extending this association of home and the uncanny to the various places Hemingway, and his fictional avatars, called home (the familiar or heimlich) versus those places that never quite feel like home—or could never feel like home again (the unfamiliar or unheimlich). Even after returning to the United States to make his home in Idaho, Hemingway, to a certain extent, remained an expatriate. Do his associations of foreign places with home offer a bridge between the geographical and the psychological in ways that echo the homeliness—heimlich/heimlichkeit—of remote and foreign places in ways that resituate him (the expatriate white male modernist) in a colonial or post-colonial world? What it is about the foreignness of places like Kenya, Key West, Cuba, and even Paris that made them feel like home. To what extent were these places temporary homes for a man in search of a permanent familiar feeling of home?

Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2014

The traditional field of the Old West never seemed to attract much attention in Spanish academia. Luckily, the rise of the paradigm of the New West has altered that anomaly so that, nowadays, a solid body of research on the subject is being carried out in several universities all over Spain. The leading exponent of this new scenario is David Río, who teaches U.S. Literature at the University of the Basque Country, and is one of the three editors of A Contested West. After exp loring for years the intricacies of the South, over the last decade he has shifted his attention to the West, putting together conferences and publications, as well as a major research project. He is also behind an unusual project in Spanish academic circles: creat ing a book series, 'American Literary West', with an editorial board formed by names as distinguished in the field as Fran k Bergon, Neil Campbell, Richard W. Etulain, Maria Herrera-Sobek, or Peter Hulme. Three essay collections on the multip le identities of West have been published in only three years: Beyond the Myth. New Perspectives on Western Texts (2011), The Neglected West. Contemporary Approaches to Western American Literature (2012), and now, A Contested West. New Readings of Place in Western American Literature (2013). Like its predecessors, the third volume offers challenging and insightful views on the West. Even the cover departs from the traditional iconograply, since it is a colorful reproduction of a poster depicting a Chicana field wo rker. Author Rick Bass pens a brief but densely lyrical introduction on the ineffable essence of the territory, noting that "there is something about the West which, though it might thus far elude precise capture, nonetheless exists, thrums, is redolent with the abilit y, it seems, to both generate and receive deep emotion" (iv), words which bring to mind The Great Gatsby. He also adds the suggestive notion that, most likely, the art and the literature of a space as vast as the West are characterized by "a greater imaginativeness, [.. .] greater loneliness, greater joys, greater volatilit ies of weather and the seasons" (vi). Many of the essays in the collection do move in this direction,

International Journal of Culture and History (EJournal), 2015

Exile is a traumatic experience that is hard to overcome, but Earnest Hemingway chose voluntary exile as a style of living. Thrusting himself into foreign cultures and nations and detaching himself from everything familiar has stimulated him intellectually and enhanced his writing immensely. He was able to convey the truth about White America's relationship with "the other" through distancing himself from the homeland. His exilic status granted him "a plurality of vision" and multiple perspectives through which he saw the world and recreated it on the page turning him into a literary genius. This essay aims to highlight the positive impact exile had on Hemingway's writing.

Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses

Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929) are novels in which imagined space and material place interact, collide and contradict. Despite both texts being set in Europe, Hemingway’s prose reveals American anxieties regarding war and identity. His protagonists are emasculated by war and alienated from the myths that have generated singular ideals of American masculinity. The novels imbue European landscapes with ritual and symbolism that create new imagined landscapes on which to perform and reassert this lost identity. Simultaneously, they are texts that expose the artifice of such performative endeavours. These oppositions and dissonances are read here through the prism of Foucault’s paradigmatic “heterotopia”. Foucault suggests that we are in an “epoch of juxtaposition” in which our conflicting understanding of space and place “cannot be superimposed”. This paper argues that Hemingway’s fiction offers a consciously empty form of symbolic space. The...

2020

Literary expatriation had an important role in the development of twentieth-century modernist writing, particularly for Americans in Paris during the interwar years. The critics who study this group tend to focus on similar themes—rejection of conservative mores in America, sexual liberation and alcohol consumption, creative cross-fertilization, and so on—such that the cultural migration to France itself is generally treated as a positive experience. Upon close review of the journalism, letters, and fiction Ernest Hemingway wrote during his residence in France, however, we find an expatriate scene that is disparate from these glowing general critical views: “[I’ve] been in hell now since Christmas” (Selected Letters 217), he wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald in September 1926 before enduring several months of despondency, during which he contemplated suicide and drafted a last will. The critical locus of this essay interprets the outcomes of long-term cultural immersion, the consequences of cultural shocks and readjustments, and the implications of social distance—to analyze an important but often neglected dimension of Hemingway’s life in Paris.

2006

This special section started its life as papers delivered at the American Association of Geographers meeting in 2015, in two panels which broadly considered the relationships between 'the work and the world'. Those panels explored the various ways in which literatures overspill their textual boundaries and interact with the world. The papers that were delivered together suggested that the space of 'the work', or literature, or art, is not necessarily distanced from the spaces of the world. From studies of mobility as a theme in literary representations, to new ways of mapping, and histories of travel and writing, these papers each argue that literary works are necessarily bound up in extra-textual space, and these extra-textual spaces are constituent parts of literature. Joining these papers is a mutual recognition that being mobile is as important as being in place for people's encounters with fiction. The interactions of mobile people with texts are used by each author as a way to think through the various expressions and consequences of the embodied and experiential act of encountering literature. In this special issue, we consider how the dynamic relationships between reader and text, person and world, can reverberate on literary creation and recreation. We demonstrate a variety of ways in which the space of literature and literature's relationship to the extra-textual world are being theorised within the broad church of literary geography. .