IMF 51646 Fiction: Hemingway vs Faulkner L

Instructor

Tony D'Souza

Class Type

Literature

Course Description

Arguably the two greatest influences on American storytelling over more than the past century are William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. Among the very few Americans to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature (Faulkner 1949, Hemingway 1954), the two were born two years apart and died one year apart. Contemporaries in every way, Faulkner and Hemingway could not have been more different in their writing styles. Faulkner’s long, rambling sentences, huge cast of characters, psychedelic dream sequences and stream of conscious narratives injected the art of American fiction with a much need shot of verve, imagination and energy. Hemingway’s exclusive use of the Anglo-Saxon half of the English language (the other half is derived from Latin) revealed the poetic sounds of short words working together (fire, flint, fish) and his use of nouns and rejection of adjectives and adverbs showed writers a new way to create imagistic settings, landscapes and characters. Faulkner set his stories exclusively in the South; Hemingway was happier writing about Americans in Europe. Both part of the legendary Lost Generation, the two completely modernized American letters. This literature course explores novels and stories by each through weekly discussions.