Title
The Consensual Voice: Fantasies of Reciprocity in James and Hemingway
Document Type
Essay
Annotation
Narratological examination of the poetic purposes underlying the dialogue of James’s The Ambassadors (1903) and Hemingway’s later The Sun Also Rises that extend meaning beyond traditional character development. Alsop focuses on the collaborative form of fictional speech in which characters echo each other in a kind of synchronized language to convey their longing for connection and consensus lost to them in the modern era. Her close reading of key scenes reveals Robert Cohn as the discursive outsider whose egocentric speech, self interest, and ideology link him to the prewar era and put him at odds with other speakers’ values.
Published in
Making Conversation: The Poetics of Voice in Modernist Fiction
Date
2019
Pages
39-68
Citation
Alsop, Elizabeth. “The Consensual Voice: Fantasies of Reciprocity in James and Hemingway.” In Making Conversation: The Poetics of Voice in Modernist Fiction, 39-68. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2019.