THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises

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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, concerns Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. I discuss the vicissitudes of Hemingway’s reputation, both sociopolitically (from midcentury man’s man to late-20th-century misogynist man to 21st-century trans woman) and aesthetically (from Nobel-winning great novelist to a writer now understood as a great writer of short stories and prose poetry rather than major novels). I explain his stylistic revolution in English prose, its relation to other currents in modernism, and its global influence. I briefly rehearse his biography. I discuss how he understood his own relation to Russian, European, British, and American literary traditions. Then I turn to his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, first considering its early reception by critics like Edmund Wilson and Leslie Fiedler to frame my own interpretation. Then, via its epigraphs from Gertrude Stein and Ecclesiastes. I discuss the novel as paradigm of the generationally self-mythologizing documentary “scene” report, to be repeated later in movements like the Beats or Alt Lit. I read the novel as a despairing post-Great-War testament akin to The Waste Land and an ironic treatment of modernity’s instability of gender. I consider the sentimentalism paradoxically generated by its hard-boiled treatment of its wounded hero, its lament over the death of religion, and its investment in the cycles of nature and the traditional art of the bullfight. Finally, I invert the novel’s anti-Semitic scapegoating of its Jewish character, Robert Cohn, who represents a form of heroism abandoned by or unavailable to the narrator and other male characters who stigmatize him. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of the American literature sequence, including forthcoming episodes on F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and William Faulkner, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett and our previous sequences on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and on George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and whatever is forthcoming in 2025. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded below the paywall: