Transatlantic Baggage: Expatriate Paris, Modernism, and the Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway
Year: 2011
Type: dissertation
Abstract: “Transatlantic Baggage: Expatriate Paris, Modernism, and the Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway” argues that Hemingway’s expatriation and apprenticeship in modernist Paris from 1921-1925 provided an important impetus for his explorations in gender alterity. The project focuses on a critical-biographical rethinking of Hemingway’s literary development, integrating previous Hemingway biography and gender studies scholarship with new revelations from the manuscript of the forthcoming first two volumes of the Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway. An updated study of the author’s literary formation is long overdue; Charles Fenton’s The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway: The Early Years (1954), for example, has served for more than fifty years as a valuable resource for understanding Hemingway’s early influences and sense of craft. But rather than present the arch of apprenticeship as a dynamic progression of received knowledge and job training, the following chapters foreground Hemingway’s instruction as a gendered process, a vocational formation deeply influenced by what Joseph Boone has called the “libidinal currents” of modernism as well as Hemingway’s complicated dealings with male and female tutelary figures, themselves often engaged in unconventional gender roles or sexual practices. Through new correspondence and manuscript analysis, I trace Hemingway’s movement from an objective, spectatorial view of modernist gender toward a more subjective, ambiguous treatment of his own hetero-masculine identity. Far from mastery, then, I show how Hemingway’s gender apprenticeship in Paris led to a progressive disorientation. From this perspective, the landscape of Hemingway’s apprenticeship now looks quite different from Fenton’s study in 1954. Although all the familiar landmarks are there – family, mentors, journalism, marriage, friendships – Hemingway’s transatlantic voyage signaled a sea change – the profound reconstitution of his views on gender and sexual identity.
Source: Louisiana State University
Author: Bonds, Patrick Blair
Institution: Louisiana State University
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2785366795