Reading Response Prompts

 
These prompts are meant to get you thinking about what you have read and to help focus your thoughts for your reading responses. You can respond to any of them, or, if you have another idea you would rather explore, you are free to write about that instead. Even if you choose to pursue an idea of your own, however, or are not writing a response that day, you should still spend at least a few minutes thinking about each of the prompts in preparation for class. In any case, I suggest doing the reading first, then checking the prompts.  For more information, review the listserv assignment.

Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, Book Two: Chapters XIV-XXIV

The love affair between Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley is one of the most famous in American fiction. Of course, this course is called “Literature of War,” not “Literature of Love.”  The way the affair progresses and the way Hemingway describes it in the narrative are both not only influenced by the war but are in a sense emblematic of the war. Discuss the ways in which Hemingway makes this affair central to a novel called A Farewell to Arms.

We talked last time about narrative. This time, consider the role and the form of dialogue in the novel. If Hemingway revolutionized narrative, he had virtually as profound an effect on the way authors would present dialogue from this time forward. Consider the style and strucure of the dialogue passages and suggest features that make it unusual.

Ernest “Papa” Hemingway has a reputation — not entirely positive — of being a hyper-masculine personality. He hunted big game in Africa, loved bullfighting (he had bullfighters as friends and became a trueaficionado of the sport), drank hard liquor in vast quantities, smoked cigars, married and was divorced by a series of beautiful and intelligent women, and when his health and mind were deteriorating (due to an undiagnosed genetic illness that was not identified for years aftr his death), he ended his own life with a shotgun blast to the head. He is, simply put, an icon. On the other hand, Zelda Fitzgerald (F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife) memorably described him as “bullfighting, bullslinging, and bullshit.” We will talk more of Hemingway’s ethos, but for now, let’s start with this question: what qualities in a man does Hemingway admire? What about in a woman? Does he admire the same qualities in both, or are they different?

 
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