Hemingway in the Digital Age: Reflections on Teaching, Reading, and Understanding

Hemingway in the Digital Age

TEACHING HEMINGWAY

Mark P. Ott, Editor

Susan F. Beegel, Founding Editor

Teaching Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises

EDITED BY PETER L. HAYS

Teaching Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms

EDITED BY LISA TYLER

Teaching Hemingway and Modernism

EDITED BY JOSEPH FRUSCIONE

Teaching Hemingway and War

EDITED BY ALEX VERNON

Teaching Hemingway and Gender

EDITED BY VERNA KALE

Teaching Hemingway and the Natural World

EDITED BY KEVIN MAIER

Teaching Hemingway and Race

EDITED BY GARY EDWARD HOLCOMB

Hemingway in the Digital Age: Reflections on Teaching, Reading, and Understanding

EDITED BY LAURA GODFREY

Hemingway in the Digital Age

Reflections on Teaching, Reading, and

Understanding

Edited by Laura Godfrey

The Kent State University Press     Kent, Ohio

© 2019 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2019014329

ISBN 978-1-60635-381-3

Manufactured in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced, in any manner whatsoever, without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of short quotations in critical reviews or articles.

URLs published in the print edition and hyperlinks included in the ebook edition of this book are provided as a convenience and for informational purposes only; they do not constitute endorsement or approval by the publisher. The publisher bears no responsibility for the accuracy, functionality, legality, or content of the URLs and hyperlinks.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Godfrey, Laura Gruber, editor.

Title: Hemingway in the digital age : reflections on teaching, reading, and understanding / edited by Laura Godfrey.

Description: Kent, Ohio : The Kent State University Press, [2019] | Series: Teaching Hemingway | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019014329 | ISBN 9781606353813 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Hemingway, Ernest, 1899-1961--Study and teaching--Technological innovations. | American literature--20th century--Study and teaching--Technological innovations.

Classification: LCC PS3515.E37 Z6186 2019 | DDC 813/.52--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019014329

23 22 21 20 19      5 4 3 2 1

For Bruce

Contents

Foreword

MARK P. OTT

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Hemingway in the Digital Age

LAURA GODFREY

Virtual Hemingways

Virtual Papa: Ernest Hemingway’s Digital Presence

LISA TYLER

Beyond the Photographs: What the Images of Hemingway’s Fish Don’t Tell Us

MICHAEL K. STEINBERG AND JORDAN CISSELL

A Meme-able Feast: Teaching Modernist Citationality and Hemingway Iconography through the Internet’s Most Infectious Replicator

KIRK CURNUTT

Hemingway for Digiphiles

How to Not Read Hemingway

BRIAN CROXALL

Concrete Particulars: The Suggestive Power of Physical World Details in Across the River and into the Trees

MARK EBEL

Putting the Medium and the Message in Perspective: Teaching The Sun Also Rises in the Digital Age

NICOLE J. CAMASTRA

Digital Resources for Teaching Hemingway

Using Digital Mapping to Locate Students in Hemingway’s World

RICHARD HANCUFF

Stories in the Land: Digital Deep Maps of Hemingway Country

LAURA GODFREY AND BRUCE R. GODFREY

Using Digital Tools to Immerse the iGeneration in Hemingway’s Geographies

REBECCA JOHNSTON

Teaching Hemingway through the Digital Archive

MICHELLE E. MOORE

Teaching Materials

Appendix A: English 482, Hemingway: End-of-Term Writing Prompts and Student Responses

LAURA GODFREY WITH KELLY OWENS, RICKY BALDRIDGE, LEE J. BRAINARD, MARSHALL J. PALMER, AND ALLISON GNECKOW

Appendix B: The Sun Also Rises I-Search Project

NICOLE J. CAMASTRA

Appendix C: English 296: Major Figures (Hemingway) Midterm Presentations

LAURA GODFREY

Appendix D: Interdisciplinary Studies 250 Syllabus

LAURA GODFREY AND ED KAITZ

Appendix E: INTR 250 Physical and Virtual Environments: Class Calendar

LAURA GODFREY AND ED KAITZ

Appendix F: Directing Students toward Hemingway’s Concrete Particulars and Intergenerational Connections

MARK EBEL

Appendix G: How to Not Read Hemingway

BRIAN CROXALL

Appendix H: Digital Resources for Teaching Hemingway

COMPILED BY LISA TYLER

Works Cited

Contributors

Index

Foreword

Mark P. Ott

How should the work of Ernest Hemingway be taught in the twenty-first century? Although the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s have faded, Hemingway’s place in the curriculum continues to inspire discussion among writers and scholars about the lasting value of his work. To readers of this volume, his life and writing remain vital and meaningful and are still culturally resonant for today’s students.

Books in the Teaching Hemingway series build on the excellent work of founding series editor Susan F. Beegel, who guided into publication the first two volumes, Teaching Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, edited by Lisa Tyler (2008), and Teaching Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, edited by Peter L. Hays (2008). In an effort to continue to be useful to instructors and professors—from high schools, community colleges, and universities—the newest volumes in this series are organized thematically, rather than around a single text. The series now includes Teaching Hemingway and Modernism (2015), edited by Joseph Fruscione, Teaching Hemingway and War (2016), edited by Alex Vernon, Teaching Hemingway and Gender (2016), edited by Verna Kale, Teaching Hemingway and the Natural World (2018), edited by Kevin Maier, and Teaching Hemingway and Race (2018), edited by Gary Edward Holcomb. This shift opens Hemingway’s work to more interdisciplinary strategies of instruction—through divergent theories, fresh juxtapositions, and ethical inquiries, and often employing emergent technology to explore media beyond the text.

Laura Godfrey’s Hemingway in the Digital Age: Reflections on Teaching, Reading, and Understanding speaks to fresh, pressing issues of intense interest to students and scholars today: How do we employ the emergent tools of the digital age to more deeply engage students with Hemingway’s work? And how do we teach his writing to new generations of students, who often cannot put away their smartphones for the length of a class period? Hemingway never anticipated a world of digiphiles, yet Godfrey’s volume provides a range of pedagogical approaches to teaching Hemingway’s writings to a generation that may prefer a digital text—and perhaps a digital world—to holding a paper text in their hands.

However, these digital tools can be used in exciting ways to bring Hemingway’s work to life for a new generation of students. The expertise and insight Godfrey brings to this topic is manifest throughout this volume. These essays illuminate new strategies for employing digital photographs, archives, and maps to ignite students’ curiosity in Hemingway country, and the geographies that inspired texts as In Our Time, The Sun Also Rises, and Across the River and into the Trees. Godfrey brings forth a diverse range essays that not only explore Hemingway’s fiction through the lens of the digital age but also revise our understanding of the complex cultural web that stimulated his imagination and his writing. Readers will quickly recognize that these digital tools create opportunities for enriching the textual experience and expanding the imagination of students.

Indeed, this volume demonstrates that Hemingway’s work is being taught in more thoughtful, creative, and innovative ways in today’s classrooms and lecture halls than ever before and that his work inspires vigorous debate and insightful discussion now more than ever.

Acknowledgments

Thanks must go first to the contributors within this volume for sharing their enthusiasm, their humor, and their astounding scholarly and pedagogical creativity. I am also deeply grateful for my colleagues at North Idaho College for their inspiration and support in creating the interdisciplinary course, INTR 250: Physical and Virtual Environments, in which the idea for this book first emerged: Lita Burns, Larry Briggs, Ed Kaitz, Lloyd Duman, Liz Adkinson, and Molly Michaud.

Special kudos also go to the brave students who took those original INTR 250 courses—as well as the students in my North Idaho College and University of Idaho Hemingway seminars—for their insights, their wit, their humor, and their intellect. This book would also not have been possible without the generous support of my home institution, North Idaho College, which awarded me a sabbatical leave as I completed the editing process.

Thanks also to Mark Ott, series editor for the Kent State University Press Teaching Hemingway volumes, who was encouraging and enthusiastic about this project from the beginning. At Kent State University Press, I owe a debt of gratitude to Susan Wadsworth-Booth, Will Underwood, Mary Young, Erin Holman, and Richard Fugini for working with me as the book moved through the channels to publication.

And last, thanks most of all to my family—my parents, William and Nancy Gruber, my husband, Bruce, and my two lovely daughters, Natalie and Julia, for always cheering me on every step of the way.

Introduction

Hemingway in the Digital Age

Laura Godfrey

The idea for this collection of essays came to me several years ago, when I team-taught an interdisciplinary capstone course at North Idaho College, titled Physical and Virtual Environments. A member of the college’s philosophy department (Ed Kaitz) and I created a reading list comprising major works of literature and philosophy, meant to help our students see the ways some of the world’s greatest writers and thinkers have expressed what it means to be in the world. We chose readings that we hoped would help illuminate the ways that our ideas about being in (as well as our perceptions of) physical environments were shifting in the so-called digital age. To help define what we mean when we speak of flourishing, we included in our syllabus selections from Plato’s Alcibiades I and parts of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. We studied Taoism, assigning Asian philosophers like Chuang Tzu and Lao Tzu, as well as the seventeenth-century Japanese haiku poet Bashō, to investigate the centuries-old quest for being present and for letting go of distractions. We read contemporary cultural critics like Sherry Turkle (Alone Together) and philosophers like Matthew Crawford (The World beyond Your Head), whereafter students engaged in heated debates about whether constant media buzzes, dings, pings, tweets, and other distractions were, as Crawford argues, making humans’ mental lives shapeless (6). We spent one entire class period examining whether or not distraction was in fact the mental equivalent of obesity (16). My colleague and I worked hard to balance out the bleaker investigations of digital-age life by reading authors like Jane McGonigal, whose 2011 book, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, looks at the positive social developments that come from various gaming behaviors. We incorporated real-world testimony from licensed family therapists about the benefits that digital devices and applications could offer to counseling patients, including apps that promote self-care and social skills (Keese-Hamm). And we read numerous articles that discussed the ways virtual or augmented realities are being harnessed to solve a host of problems as diverse as increasing access to education for underrepresented groups, preserving Native American oral traditions, curing postoperative pain, and easing posttraumatic stress disorder among veterans.

The literary selections we read during this semester allowed us a break from such direct examination of the darkness and light associated with living in the digital age. We selected several writers who for us have always embodied—both through craft and characters—the art of being fully immersed in a place, of paying close attention to the world. We read Thoreau’s Walden, Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, and Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. And while the students appreciated Thoreau’s prickly outrage at the bustling technological intrusions of the nineteenth century and loved Cather’s vivid, lush prose paean to the American Southwest, it was Hemingway’s novel that seemed to shake them up. We framed our discussions of the book around the question of how these characters were trying to live life all the way up, the way Hemingway’s bullfighters did. Which characters, we asked, were most engaged with the world around them? Which paid closest attention to others and to their environments? And did Hemingway seem to assign value to those who paid close attention? What could we, as twenty-first-century readers, learn from examining closely the ways these characters attempted to live fully in the world? Within this framework, Hemingway’s 1926 Lost Generation novel emerged not simply as a chronicle of characters adrift in post–World War I chaos and misery. Instead, the book arose in stark relief as a work about the value—indeed, the necessity—of thoughtfully trying to consider, observe, and possibly even understand and connect with people and places. It became a book about the beauty of paying close attention.

We can define the often-used term digital age as an era during which the transfer of information moves at lightning speed. It is a time in which much of the world has undergone radical changes in the ways humans communicate and in the forms in which we encounter—and trust—information. New, intimate relationships with technology and increasingly digitally influenced selfhoods have swiftly emerged over these first two decades of the twenty-first century, states of being that Sherry Turkle describes as new state[s] of the self, itself, split between the screen and the physical real, wired into existence through technology (16). Our new selves often encounter the world with, and through, digital devices, smartphones in particular. Although access to digital technologies differs depending on a number of factors, ownership of a smartphone increasingly spans geographical, social, economic, and racial demographics, with projections that there will soon be 6.1 billion smartphone owners across the globe (Lunden). According to the Pew Research Center, 77 percent of Americans own smartphones and 94 percent of U.S. adults ages eighteen to twenty-nine own smartphones (Pew Research Center, Mobile). The Pew report data also demonstrates that reliance on smartphones for online access is especially common among younger adults, non-whites, and lower-income Americans. For an ever-increasing number of people, then—including many of the students we teach—life in the twenty-first century involves the ownership of a digital device.

My lifetime thus far is about equally split between a pre-internet and internet world. My middle-class family didn’t purchase a home computer until 1992, the year I was a sophomore in high school. I learned to type on an actual typewriter. Until I was halfway through my freshman year in college, I handwrote all of the drafts of my papers on lined notebook paper. In 1994, the year I enrolled as a freshman at Emory University, email was brand new; I remember going down to the basement of my dorm to send emails (at all hours of the night) to friends who were far away in other schools. Throughout my education, as I progressed from undergraduate to graduate study, I watched my professors learn—with varying degrees of success—to adapt some of the newest digital technologies to their classes. In 1995 my poetry professor, Harry Rusche, created his own website, still up and running, Lost Poets of the Great War: it was one of the first interactive educational web spaces I’d ever seen, and I loved using it. Five years later, in my MA program I was asked to compose biweekly discussion posts on Romantic poets within an online learning management system, a task I loathed, first, because the posts were clearly not being read by anyone, and second, because the digital format made my words seem shallow, decidedly un-Byronic, permanent, and unretractable. But by the time I had finished my PhD at Washington State University in 2005, I had acclimated: my campus and scholarly life were fully immersed in digital technologies. When I began my teaching career at North Idaho College a year later, all new faculty members were expected to develop blended learning environments, mixtures of physical and virtual world pedagogies.

My relationship with technology and education, then, is multidimensional. I am not a digital native—someone who cannot remember a time without digital technologies—nor do I fully identify as a digital immigrant, in Marc Prensky’s characterization, someone who learns to adapt to their environment but who always retain[s], to some degree, their foot in the past (2). I don’t like to think of myself as having one foot stuck in the past, because that makes me sound stuffy and intractable. I am neither digiphobe nor digiphile. I enjoy many of the changes that digital life brings about, and I adapt, more or less flexibly, to my twenty-first-century students and their constantly changing educational needs. I use digital technologies in my classes almost every day, and for years now I have participated in creating digital learning tools for my literature students, some of which are discussed later in this collection. But at the same time, there are still plenty of days when my students and I just spend time reading printed books and talking together about what we read. I have always believed that education is a luxury and a beauty to which everyone deserves equal access, but at the community college where I teach, plenty of my students have not had—for various reasons—any chance to enter the academy with anything remotely close to equality. Many of my students work multiple part-time jobs, are single parents with young children, and live in constant fear of not being able to pay rent or buy groceries or pay for a doctor visit. If my literature classes can provide these students a quiet space to read and ask the big questions—like Who am I? What’s worth fighting for? Who’s lying to us? What’s my purpose? What’s the point of it all?"—then I sleep a little better at night (Ilgunas 243). Assigning them to read Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises or Big Two-Hearted River will not help these students pay for their parking permits or their groceries or their monthly smartphone plans (and yes, even my most economically disadvantaged students have smartphones), but reading Hemingway does help them see that their twenty-first-century struggles are part of a larger, intricate human web of suffering, anxiety, triumph, and magnificence.

There are two broad aims for the essays in the Hemingway in the Digital Age collection: to make available to high school, college, and university teachers a wide selection of the best techniques and contemporary digital tools for teaching Ernest Hemingway to twenty-first-century students, and to raise awareness of the ways that Hemingway’s writing is increasingly useful for digital humanists and their own scholarly projects, projects that can in turn enrich the literature classroom itself. How do we uncover the dense complexities of Hemingway’s seemingly simple prose to our twenty-first-century students? How can we highlight his characters’ attachments to physical environments for classes often better attuned to virtual ones? Are there are other qualities of digital age life that make our students somehow more connected to Hemingway’s life and his writing, connections between twenty-first-century transhumanism and twentieth-century modernism that are worth our time and attention? Contributors to this collection expose some of the interesting divisions—and the remarkable, unexplored parallels—between Hemingway’s works and our own students’ digital era, offering ways to bring those comparisons to life in the classroom. And several authors describe pedagogical opportunities made possible with digital applications or digital humanities approaches. I have found that Hemingway’s world seems very remote to many of the students I teach—a disconnect mentioned by several of my students in the Teaching Materials section of the book—and these digital tools can help illuminate qualities of his work and life in ways that our twenty-first-century students will find immediately accessible.

The metaphors we once used for going online are no longer relevant. Gone from the common lexicon is the image of the internet as a vast ocean which we surf, nor is online any longer a place one chooses to go, a fact that reveals the first sentence of this paragraph as laughably old-fashioned. Instead, those of us and our students who live lives increasingly augmented by digital devices often live a hybrid existence, always fully or partially connected to the internet. In 1993, author Michael Heim wrote in his book The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality that in the near future, our worlds would be enhanced with reality augmentation: he defines this state of being as inhabiting an electronic realm where reality and symbolized reality constitute a third entity: virtual reality (77). We’ve arrived: Heim’s predicted hybrid physical/virtual spaces exist all around us, across many corners of the globe.

If we also define our era as the age of distraction (this is again Matthew Crawford’s term), then much of Ernest Hemingway’s body of work can be presented as a counternarrative to distraction, as a testament to the art of disciplined, focused concentration on where we are and on the people right in front of us. As Scott Knickerbocker phrases it, the power of close reading Hemingway’s writing [serves] as an antidote to the technology-induced condition of our day: continuous partial attention (212). In this twenty-first-century digital age comes an increasing vocabulary about the importance of being mindful, present, intentional, and engaged, and Ernest Hemingway’s writing has become relevant for students of all ages in new ways. In the past few years, on secondary and postsecondary campuses across the country, diverse efforts for greater mindfulness have sprung up like mushrooms after a rain: we offer Mindful Meditation sessions for students, staff, and faculty; in meetings we speak of intentional advising; we wrestle with syllabus technology policies in an effort to keep students’ focus away from their devices without appearing too draconian; we work hard, too, to ensure that other students (who require technological assistance in our classrooms) have access to the tools they need. It is clear that a significant part of life for educators in the digital age is an anxiety about technological distractions, or about how to use technology to increase student access to education, or about how to harness digital technologies in useful ways to—as the common saying goes—meet students where they are without sacrificing rigor or straying from important content.

Hemingway had the ability—and the necessary melancholy—to recognize the ephemeral nature of any experience while still in the midst of the experience itself; mythologizing the moment was as regular a practice for him as it is for many of our digital-age students and for many of us. Similarly, we strive for such mythologizing of moments when we record events and upload them to our social media accounts, whenever we stop to take pictures of our meals, our clothes, our pets, our balcony sunset views, our friends and families. Increasingly, part of modern life seems to be the practice of experiencing while recording, and indeed, more and more twenty-first-century experience seems to happen through recording and sharing, whether that record be in the form of video or photograph or tweet or meme. But this, too, is an illuminating reminder of the past: even in the late nineteenth century, writes Michael North, when the camera had come to be an indispensable witness to both private and public life, the basis of modern media society was established (180). Perhaps the main difference is that now there are simply more cameras. The thrill of capturing and sharing images of ourselves appears to be the same across the ages—North describes "the first real photographic craze, inspired by the carte de visite in the 1850s, [which] provided the peculiarly modern thrill of duplicating and transmitting oneself as an image (179). Every time we post a photo on a social media platform or send one to friends and family from a personal device, we’re participating in that same peculiarly modern thrill."

The broad desire many of us have to record our lives is often tied to our need to share and showcase and thus preserve; Hemingway’s desire to record often originates from that same impulse. The instinct behind his need to capture and record even the smallest details of his daily experiences surfaces in his essay Monologue to the Maestro, an Esquire piece published in October 1935, where he instructs readers that all writers must train themselves in the art of paying attention:

Listen now. When people talk listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe. You should be able to go into a room and when you come out know everything that you saw there and not only that. If that room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling. Try that for practice. When you’re in town stand outside the theatre and see how the people differ in the way they get out of taxis or motor cars. There are a thousand ways to practice. And always think of other people. (By-Line 219–20)

I have used this passage to introduce Hemingway’s writing to undergraduate students for most of my teaching career, but his advice to writers has never felt more relevant.

Those of us who teach Hemingway know how the subtle textures of his prose can provide valuable training for contemporary students of all ages, students who need help learning to read slowly and with close attention to a literary text. In fact, the novelist Andre Dubus III touched on these benefits in his 2012 PEN Hemingway keynote address, remarking, In this digital present where so many human faces are lit with the glow of one screen after another, a time when the notion of individuality and the truly real is beginning to blur, more than ever before we need the life’s work of Ernest Hemingway (15). Amid a buffet of terms emerging as terms for whatever cultural epoch exists after post-modernism—among the choices are digimodernism, hypermodermism, and post-postmodernism—scholars are increasingly using the term metamodernism to refer to the emergent sensibility of artistic production in the twenty-first century (Veremeulen and van der