Modernism : An Essay

Thursday:  Wolfe and Hemingway.  Discuss the two different “modernist” styles of each writer.  They stand for two very different aesthetics, but are both modernists.

After World War I, he and other modernists "lost faith in the central institutions of Western civilization," by reacting against the elaborate style of 19th century writers and by creating a style "in which meaning is established through dialogue, through action, and silences—a fiction in which nothing crucial—or at least very little—is stated explicitly.

Adan Karr

December 6, 2011

Robert Johnson

English 3313

“From A Retrospect” : Hemingway and Wolfe

At first glance, it seems as though every modernist writer had a self containment to their writing. However, two prose 'modernist' writers Thomas Wolfe and Ernest Hemingway had a rather contradistinctive way of writing. Wolfe’s life involvement in his writing is something to take note of since there has to be a clear attachment (sentiment) to his work.

Let me start off by saying that Wolfe was a major badass. His writing had emotion throughout The Lost Boy. He used images as symbols of other things for example, the intersection of the streets, the stamps, and the apron. Plus, when you read Wolfe you almost feel like you're reading something unfiltered but it still had the modernist quality of rhythm and flow. The adaptions of modernism, unlike most of the writers that are still relevant, were some that Wolfe cared little for. I say this because he chose to write about “real” people… about “real” America, and what America was really going through. His writing had characteristics of sentimentality and even realism. How else could someone write autobiographical? The characters in The Lost Boy were of families going through the recession and young Robert being a clever dealer with people at the market. How a hardworking dad would stand up for his son when he was accused of stealing by the old Crockers meanwhile,  Hemingway's  characters in The Snows of Kilimanjaro, were superficial and often wandered of how the events would have been different if they would have re-visited Paris instead of Africa.

Ernest Hemingway wrote with much conciseness, reading it aloud makes his work seem so repetitive but it wasn't, he was strategic with his sentence structure and the way he used dialogue in his prose. Like Pound's From A Retrospect, where he writes what it is to write modernism, says, "use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation." It seems that is the case for Hemingway's The Snow of Kilimanjaro. He did not use a single worthless dialogue tag to tell how the characters where feeling but he expressed that through their actions. It seems odd to read since we are exposed to today's best sellers where they use dialogue tags so loosely, that I am sure, they do so to not seem repetitive. In The Snow of Kilimanjaro, Hemingway uses basic "he said," "she said" tags. He wrote it in third person which probably made it easier to do so also. Hemingway also wrote about the way his characters were feeling in third person. He did this to show Harry’s predicament of being a lazy writer and blaming his for allowing him to forget all about writing and for pushing to be more socially involved with the upper class. It finishes with a twist, ( which I fucking hate) I don’t know what the damn hyena’s relevance is to the story other than they are trapped in Africa.

If you had to choose who the more modernist of the two is, it’s definitely Hemingway. He is the face of modernism in prose. Wolfe’s affiliation with modernism, I believe, is the time in which he wrote in.

A :)