Title
"There's No One Thing That's True": Hemingway Criticism and the Environmental Humanities
Document Type
Book Chapter
Annotation
Assesses Hemingway's status among environmentalists since the term "ecocriticism," coined in 1978, began redirecting scholarly thinking, especially about literary modernism, nature and culture. Recognizes the influence of essays in the Hemingway and the Natural World conference and collection and of Susan F. Beegel's article "Eye and Heart: Hemingway's Education as a Naturalist." The territory is marked by critical arguments about Hemingway's compassion, or seeming lack of it, for animals and the elegiac voice he often brings to writings of landscape and nature. Essay surveys recent strands of criticism approaching Hemingway in terms of animality, pastoralism, and eco-feminism, though notes a lack, as of yet, in criticism through the lens of currently vital ideas such as climatology. Suggests opportunities for Hemingway studies through emerging disciplines such as ecomasculinities, biosemiotics, material ecocriticism, and eco-cosmopolitanism. Warns against missing the complexities presented by a duality often identified by Hemingway's sporting affairs and his "proto-ecologist" concerns.
Published in
Date
2020
Pages
189-203
Citation
del Gizzo, Suzanne and Kirk Curnutt, eds. The New Hemingway Studies. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020.