Teaching Hemingway and Modernism

Teaching Hemingway and Modernism presents concrete, intertextual models for using Hemingway’s work effectively in various classroom settings, so students can understand the pertinent works, definitions, and types of avant-gardism that inflected his art. The fifteen teacher-scholars whose essays are included in the volume offer approaches that combine a focused individual treatment of Hemingway’s writing with clear links to the modernist era and offer meaningful assignments, prompts, and teaching tools.

The essays and related appendices balance text, context, and classroom practice while considering a broad and student-based audience. The contributors address a variety of critically significant questions—among them:

How can we view and teach Hemingway’s work along a spectrum of modernist avant-gardism?

How can we teach his stylistic minimalism both on its own and in conjunction with the more expansive styles of Joyce, Faulkner, Woolf, and other modernists?

What is post modernist about an author so often discussed exclusively as a modernist, and how might we teach Hemingway’s work vis-à-vis that of contemporary authors?

How can teachers bridge twentieth- and twenty first- century pedagogies for Hemingway studies and American literary studies in high school, undergraduate, and graduate settings? What role, if any, should new media play in the classroom?

Teaching Hemingway and Modernism is an indispensable tool for anyone teaching Hemingway, and it offers exciting and innovative approaches to understanding one of the most iconic authors of the modernist era.