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Preface
- Louisiana State University Press
- Chapter
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Preface This book is the first comprehensive study of the short story art of the twentieth century’s most influential fiction writer. It is aimed at several audiences : Hemingway scholars and enthusiasts, critics of twentieth- century literature, fiction writers, and people interested in the short story as a genre. Over the past four decades, a wealth of excellent cultural, thematic, and biographical scholarship has been written on Hemingway’s stories. But explorations of his craft have been few and far between, and the most recent book-length study of his overall aesthetics, one not limited to the stories, came out in 1973. In attempting to redress this imbalance through a close analysis of his story art, I hope to illuminate an area, in both Hemingway studies and literary criticism, that has been neglected, incompletely analyzed, and, in some instances, badly misunderstood. A second goal is to provide a set of analytic tools for exploring short stories. Academic studies of the genre have been plentiful but have also tended to focus on thematic and cultural concerns, or else on theories of narrative. Because scholarship on story craft is underdeveloped, I’ve found it necessary to coin conceptual terms in order to address aspects of Hemingway ’s short stories that have hitherto eluded literary criticism; this terminology should prove useful to future studies of the genre and other writers working within it. In some cases, the terms are new, and in others I’ve borrowed from a range of sources—theorists, critics, and practicing story writers. Such terms as sequence displacement, implication omission, tonal openings, present absence, Conradian split, disjunctive bump, rounded closed endings, seeded closed endings, float-offs, normative center, illustrative stamp, and recapitulation with variation are my own. Others—for instance , impressionism and expressionism—have been employed so loosely and variously—in literary criticism if not in art history—that I’ve been compelled to redefine them. Still others—delayed decoding, the logic of the eye, and even focalizer—derive from sources not widely known outside the circles of academic criticism. These conceptual tools describe and open up for analysis elements of the genre that readers will recognize in the fiction, xii Preface elements to which they have already responded in their reading. I’ve tried to explain the terms clearly so that they will be useful rather than arcane and will keep our focus on Hemingway’s art and not on my critical apparatus . Too much jargon for its own sake proliferates in English studies, serving as a gatepost to an increasingly limited, elitist, and out-of-touch discourse community. Fiction reading is, and should always be, a democratic affair. Criticism should be, too, extending the boundaries of understanding and appreciation rather than marking off who is damned and who is saved in some weird academic version of the Puritans’ morphology of conversion . Therefore, I’ve attempted, above all, to be accessible, to write in such a way as to appeal to an intelligent general audience while at the same time not insulting the sensibilities of specialists. A third and related goal is to reconfigure the place of short fiction in literary studies. Although the short story is one of the oldest and most popular of literary genres and, along with poetry, the genre most frequently employed for pedagogical purposes in literary surveys, nevertheless, in academia it has been something of a bastard stepchild. Short stories are used to demonstrate various approaches to literature and are mined for cultural content; rarely are they appreciated within the context of genre. Being short, a story is convenient. But, as with any literary genre, the art of the short story has changed over time, including such periods of accelerated evolution as the modern era, during which Hemingway was the major innovator . Not merely “more fiction,” the story plays by its own set of rules, possesses its own conventions, and differs significantly from its younger siblings: the nouvelle, novella, and novel. In many ways, the short story is closer to lyric poetry than to other forms of fiction, a point made by such different writers as Frank O’Connor (Interview 165), Wallace Stevens (Letters 411–12), and Hemingway himself (qtd. in Mary Welsh Hemingway 352). As with poetry, story language is extremely compressed and rich, demanding detailed analysis. Thirty years ago, Jackson J. Benson complained that Hemingway’s readability had caused critics to glide along the surface: “simplicity remains one of the main misconceptions about the stories, persisting among critics and general readers...