Fitzgerald and Hemingway

The work of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway continues to receive a significant amount of critical attention. As before, I must emphasize the necessity for selectivity in this chapter.

i Fitzgerald

This year's scholarship consists of one monograph, two essay collections, and 17 articles. Scholars generally take familiar approaches, including studies of Fitzgerald's relationships to other writers, explorations of literary influences, and considerations of historical context, particularly his relationship to popular culture. There are, however, some notable gaps and missed opportunities, and it is worth noting that without the two essay collections the year would have been a lean one. Critics do not appear interested at present in defending Fitzgerald's intellectual seriousness or articulating his connection to major thinkers of his time. In addition, there is a noticeable dearth of criticism on Fitzgerald's vexed and contradictory social/economic thinking and his critique of consumerism, surprising omissions given the current economic climate. Only two articles tackle issues of race and ethnicity in his work, another surprise given current events in the United States. Film, though, is a bright spot, thanks in part to the release of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Fitzgerald's relationship to Hollywood and film is a mainstay of the scholarship, but work on this subject tends to be uneven. A discernible trend in both Fitzgerald and Hemingway scholarship is a focus on narrative and style. In Fitzgerald's case, these narrative studies testify to the status of The Great Gatsby as a touchstone text in the American literary canon.

a. Books and Essay Collections

Gautam Kundu's Fitzgerald and the Influence of Film: The Language of Cinema in the Novels (McFarland) is the year's only monograph on Fitzgerald. Kundu argues that Fitzgerald's interest and involvement in cinema allowed him to infuse a film aesthetic into his writing by importing cinematic techniques and concepts. He addresses specific cinematic elements in relation to Fitzgerald's novels, including visualization (point of view and the use of "camera" techniques such as the close-up and the long shot), editing processes (transitional devices such as cuts, dissolves, and fades), aural devices (sound effects, dialogue, and so on), and various other film techniques such as flashbacks and use of color and lighting. The rationale for these demonstrations, however, remains a bit sketchy. Kundu suggests that understanding these cinematic elements of Fitzgerald's writing may lead readers to a fuller appreciation of his craft and his indebtedness to cinema, while also accounting for some aspects of his style that have not otherwise been fully explored. He seems to recognize the thinness of this claim because he also abruptly suggests in the conclusion that "a cinematic reading yields fascinating insights into the novels' cultural meanings, and thus helps draw attention to issues of race (and ethnic heritage), class, gender/sexual preference, and the like." This second claim may be true, but it is never sufficiently demonstrated. Studies of Fitzgerald and film nearly always privilege the literature, usually focusing on theme and characterization or the process of adapting the works for film. Kundu's formalist study, which employs the vocabularies of both film and literary analysis expertly, is thus a welcome change, although it occasionally labors under long but well-researched considerations of the reciprocal relationship between film and writing.

Twenty-First-Century Readings of "Tender is the Night," ed. William Blazek and Laura Rattray (Liverpool, 2007), is the first collection of essays in over 20 years on Fitzgerald's controversial fourth novel. The goal of this new volume, comprising 12 essays by established Fitzgerald scholars from the United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States, is to update criticism on the novel for a new generation of readers. Although the essays are not divided into formal sections, the collection does focus on many of the familiar themes in Fitzgerald scholarship, such as historical and social context, issues of narrative and style, considerations of race and gender, and comparisons of the novel to works by other authors. The main areas of inquiry may be familiar, but the essays are fresh, exciting, and nuanced reconsiderations of this complicated...