Title
Full Immersion: Modernist Aesthetics and the US Literature of Experience
Document Type
Essay
Annotation
In his analysis of the intersection between US and Latin American literatures, Lawrence situates Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not and Porter’s “Hacienda” and other Mexico-based stories within the development of US literature of experience, arguing for the key role such experiential literature played in the formation of modernist literature itself. Discusses Hemingway’s lived experience in Cuba, frustration with leftist critics who accused him of distancing himself from Depression era issues, and critique of politicized writing in To Have and Have Not through his portrayal of Harry Morgan’s foil, social novelist Richard Gordon, who writes from the comfort of his Key West home. Concludes with a summary of the contemporary debate among New Critics like Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate on the relationship between the writer’s experience and literary production.
Published in
Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño
Date
2018
Pages
125-165
Citation
Lawrence, Jeffrey. “Full Immersion: Modernist Aesthetics and the US Literature of Experience.” In Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño, 125-65. New York: Oxford UP, 2018.