ENG 204 - Reading Hemingway & Fitzgerald

Course unit(s): 1
Meets GAR (students beginning prior to Fall 2024): Meets general academic requirement HU.
Like Keats & Shelley, Hemingway & Fitzgerald always come to the party as a pair. They stand in the center with drinks in hand (many drinks) as the twin pillars of prose Modernism in America, foundational writers in every sense of the term, widely influential, helping to define the shape of the novel and short story in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Both were at the height of their artistic power in the 1920s and 30s helping define the period and name the post-war “lost generation.” Along with other writers like Joyce and Stein, they put Paris on the literary map. And they were both expatriates, self-exiled to an old Europe that proved extremely fertile as an artistic environment to foreign writers. It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that Hemingway invented the Café as Writing Zone, the Starbucks of the 1920s. Although he lived abroad, Fitzgerald was more influential at home and in New York City where he and his wife became the poster kids of the 1920s, writing about, wildly living and epitomizing the era. And yet like Keats & Shelley, Hemingway & Fitzgerald are profoundly different writers with different philosophies and aesthetic styles. As we’ll see in this course, they stake out the poles in the spectrum of modernist writing. One reason for this, I will hazard upfront, is their early experience with and relationship to World War I. We’ll learn more about their experiences by reading extracts from their two biographies. We’ll also study a number of historical texts that place our authors in the essential contexts of World War I and the “Roaring Twenties.” These two authors were so essentially products of their time that it’s impossible to get a complete sense of their work without some knowledge of the vital social and cultural background. Satisfies departmental Reading X, Social Justice and Prose requirements.