scholarly journals The Camouflage of the Sacred in the Short Fiction of Hemingway

2014 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-78
Author(s):  
Ali Zaid

Abstract This essay examines the short fiction of Ernest Hemingway in the light of Mircea Eliade’s notion of the camouflage of the sacred and the larval survival of original spiritual meaning. A subterranean love pulsates beneath the terse dialogue of Hemingway’s characters whose inner life we glimpse only obliquely. In the short play (“Today Is Friday”) and four short stories (“The Killers,” “A Clean Well-Lighted Place,” “Old Man at the Bridge,” and “The Light of the World,” discussed here, light imagery, biblical allusions, and the figure of Christ, reveal a hidden imaginary universe. This sacral dimension has been largely overlooked by critics who dwell on the ostensible spiritual absence that characterizes Hemingway’s fiction.

English Today ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Gang Sui

When delivering a speech at a meeting of the Writers’ Congress, Ernest Hemingway said as a fiction writer: A writer's problem does not change. He himself changes, but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and having found what is true, to project it in such a way that it becomes part of the experience of the person who reads it. (1937) Does this statement still ring true today? If it does, what approach should and can be taken for Chinese university students to write ‘truly’ during their fiction writing workshops in English when they know what they try to accomplish is indeed something fictional or self-evidently ‘untrue’? What characterises the main thematic and stylistic elements of Chinese students’ short stories written in English as creative outcomes?


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 685-692
Author(s):  
Siti Ayu Hardiyanti

This study aims to explore the language style of Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Old Man”. This research describes the stylistic used in the short story. Ernest Hemingway is one of the famous writers of prose and short story. Many people recognize his special works for short stories because Ernest Hemingway has a characteristic that makes him one of the best short story writers in Europe from a young age. My Old Man is the first work known for the lot use of stylistic styles that distinguish this story from Hemingway’s other works. The researcher limits the stylistic only to explore linguistics such as pragmatics and semantics. In addition, the researcher explains the features of stylistic devices which are on simile, poetry, and calque. This study combines 2 methods of analysis, namely textual and stylistic analysis. The results illustrated how Hemingway used stylistic to describe a child as the narrator, where he told in detail the dark experiences of his father in the world of horse racing in a coherent manner. Hemingway combined his imagination with processing language styles in the story. 


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alda Correia

The representation of the world cannot be separated from its spatial context. Making the effort to understand how space and landscape influence short stories and their structure, and are represented in them, can help us to make sense of the role of this formerly underestimated subgenre, its social and cultural connections and dissonances, its relation to storytelling and popular narratives, and its alleged low importance. How does the short story genre relate to regional and landscape literature? Can we see it as humble fiction and, in this case, how does the humbleness of this subgenre play a part in the growth of the modernist short story? The oral, mythic and fantastic sources of the short story, together with the travel memoir tradition that brought the love for landscape description and the interest in the narration of brief and easily publishable episodes of local life, helped to consolidate a connection between the short story form and regional literature. ‘Humbleness’ is used here in association with the absence of complexity, plainness, simplicity of approach to a complex reality, straightforwardness. From this perspective, aesthetic value was usually absent from regionalist fiction as its only aim was to render the local truth faithfully. However, this ‘aesthetic humbleness’, which should not be used as a generalization, has been increasingly questioned in regard to modernism, postmodernism and postcolonialism and also when we consider specific works.


Author(s):  
Jade Broughton Adams

F. Scott Fitzgerald is remembered primarily as a novelist, but he wrote nearly two hundred short stories for popular magazines such as the widely-read Saturday Evening Post. These stories are vividly infused with the new popular culture of the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, from jazz and blues music to motion pictures and performing arts. This book demonstrates how popular culture had a deep impact on Fitzgerald’s work, not just in terms of evoking period detail, but by confirming Fitzgerald as an experimental writer whose popular short stories reflect the serious modernist concerns occupying writers such as Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Sherwood Anderson, Dorothy Parker, and Langston Hughes. This book explores how popular culture impacted on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s literary aesthetics on both thematic and formal levels, to a greater extent than previously recognised. Encompassing spheres of both American studies and cultural studies, this book offers a revisionist perspective on Fitzgerald’s short fiction of the interwar period, which is often overlooked in favour of the novels, especially The Great Gatsby. By exploring Fitzgerald’s fascination with leisure, specifically the intertwined cultural spheres of dance, music, theatre, and film, this book argues that he innovatively imported practices borrowed from other popular cultural media into his short stories, deploying disruptive techniques of ambiguity and parody that sit in tension with reader expectations of his lyrical style and the commercial publication contexts of his stories.


2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 267-278
Author(s):  
Aldona Zańko

Abstract The novel The trial, telling the story of the groundless arrest and prosecution of the bank clerk Josef K., remains one of the bestknown and most influential works written by Franz Kafka. Depicting the pointless struggle of a man placed at the mercy of a remote, inaccessible authority, it gives a symbolic account of the human condition in the modern era, characterised by the lack of universal truth, estrangement, confusion and existential impotence. Grasping the very idea of existential modernity, the novel provides ongoing inspiration for a great number of modernist and postmodernist writers all over the world, including Scandinavia. In the article presented below, The trial is examined as an intertext within the genre of the Scandinavian short prose, as it unfolds at breakthrough of modernism and postmodernism. Starting with the literary and critical works of the Danish modernist Villy Sørensen, and moving forward throughout the Danish and Norwegian minimalism of the 1990's, the paper discusses a range of different aspects of The trial, as they reappear in the short stories written by some of the main representatives of the Scandinavian short story. In this way, the article elucidates the relevance of Kafka's novel as an intertext for contemporary Scandinavian short fiction, as well as draws attention to the dialogical dimension of the genre.


2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (II) ◽  
pp. 25-38
Author(s):  
Umar Shehzad

Taking issue with Sigmund Freud’s premise on the subject, this essay seeks alternately to inquire into, challenge, and broaden our understanding of the uncanny. Even though this genius from the field of psychoanalysis is quite right in wreathing the uncanny with the murky aura that it wears to date, his insistence on driving one way traffic from heimlich to das unheimliche while at the same time refusing to let it out of “the realm of the frightening” gives a kind of staleness and fixity to the subject of the uncanny, which is no less than its undoing, especially when it comes to its artistic representation. Eschewing psychoanalytical debates and focusing rather upon the post-phenomenological discourse, I’ll show as to how the homely artistic devices like paradox, reversal, thematic and narrative flux, unswerving matter-of-factness yield an uncanny import in “The Rocking-Horse Winner” and “The Book Bag,” the two short stories by Lawrence and Maugham respectively. Insisting upon the essential uncanniness of art, this article proposes that the uncanny hinges on what Martin Seel (2005) describes as art’s fundamental “irreality” and Theodor Adorno (1973) calls “appearances”. I hypothesize that the uncanny owes its life to a continual movement of the subject matter between openness and closure, between imagination and reality, between the outer world and the inner domain, between what Bhabha (1992) alludes to as the world and the home.


Author(s):  
Sergey Nickolsky

The question of the Russian man – his past, present and future – is the central one in the philosophy of history. Unfortunately, at present this area of philosophy is not suffciently developed in Russia. Partly the reason for this situation is the lack of understanding by researchers of the role played by Russian classical literature and its philosophizing writers in historiosophy. The Hunting Sketches, a collection of short stories by I.S. Turgenev, is a work still undervalued, not fully considered not only in details but also in general meanings. And this is understandable because it is the frst systematic encyclopedia of Russian worldview, which is not envisaged by the literary genre. To a certain extent, Turgenev’s line is continued by I. Goncharov (the theme of the mind and heart), L. Tolstoy (the theme of the living and the dead, nature and society, the people and the lords), F. Dostoevsky (natural and rational rights), A. Chekhov (worthy and vulgar life). This article examines the philosophical nature of The Hunting Sketches, its structure and content. According to author’s opinion, stories can be divided into ten groups according to their dominant meanings. Thus, in The Hunting Sketches the main Russian types are depicted: “natural man,” rational, submissive, cunning, honest, sensitive, passionate, poetic, homeless, suffering, calmly accepting death, imbued with the immensity of the world. In the image and the comments of the wandering protagonist, Ivan Turgenev reveals his own philosophical credo, which he defnes as a moderate liberalism – freedom of thought and action, without prejudice to others.


Author(s):  
Lyndsey Stonebridge

Samuel Beckett is known for his unique abstraction of human suffering. This chapter shows how his wartime experiences transformed his writing, producing one of the first really critical literary depictions of the new subject of human rights and humanitarianism. Beckett’s engagement with what he described in 1946 as ‘the time-honoured conception of humanity in ruins’ began with his own experience of displacement and with his work with the Irish Red Cross in Saint-Lô. The characters who wander through the three short stories that he first wrote in French, ‘La Fin’, ‘L’Explusé’, and ‘Le Calmant’, collectively known as the Nouvelles, are both subject to a regime of humanitarian indifference (‘They clothed me and gave me money’ read the first lines of ‘La Fin’) and restless agents, stumbling in a stripped down French, groping for a new narrative. These are the new clowns of the dark background of difference, ironists of their own suffering, chroniclers of the gap that had opened up between the placeless people and the rest of the world.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document