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Professor Wai Chee Dimock continues her discussion of Hemingway’s In Our Time, testing four additional clusters of chapters and vignettes. She offers readings of each cluster that focus on Hemingway’s logics of expressivity, substitution, and emotional resilience. She concludes that Hemingway mixes tragedy and comedy as genres of writing to produce a humor that vacillates between irony and farce.

Warning: This lecture contains graphic content and/or adult language that some users may find disturbing.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:55 — 45.7MB) | Embed

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Professor Wai Chee Dimock discusses Hemingway’s first book In Our Time, a collection of vignettes published in 1925 that launched Hemingway’s career as a leading American modernist. Professor Dimock examines a cluster of three vignettes from In Our Time to show how Hemingway’s laconic style naturalizes problems of pain and violence amidst the ethnic tensions of the American Midwest. Drawing on the theoretical writings of critics Elaine Scarry and Susan Sontag, and the artistic representations of painter Edvard Munch, Professor Dimock shows how language probes the empathetic boundaries of communal suffering in “Indian Camp” and “Chapter II.” She concludes with a discussion of “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” that shows how inter-ethnic conflict between Native Americans and whites is neutralized by the primitive impulse of peacekeeping, the opposite of the violence she reads in the two other vignettes in this cluster.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 43:09 — 39.5MB) | Embed

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Professor Dimock introduces the class to the works of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner, the premiere writers of American modernism. She orients their novels along three “scales” of interpretation: global geopolitics, experimental narration, and sensory detail. Invoking the writings of critic Paul Fussell, she argues that all three writers are united by a preoccupation with World War I and the implications that the Great War has for irony in narrative representation.