“There Were Many Indians in the Story”: Hidden History in Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River”

The essay considers the importance of hidden history in “Big Two-Hearted River” and what Hemingway may have had in mind in creating a landscape that is white on the surface yet penetrated by Indian presences underneath. Hidden inscriptions of Indianness have to be searched for in the text and are part of an interior landscape in which war and insurrection have an important role to play in explaining how the story is crafted. Hemingway’s knowledge of tribal landscapes and tribal histories, together with his readings in modernist anthropology, underpin a scholarly interest in primitive religion that stayed with him throughout his life.

“I, Also, Am in Michigan”: Pastoralism of Mind in Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River”

This article examines “Big Two-Hearted River” in terms of Leo Marx’s “machine in the garden” theory of American pastoralism. Nick’s reaction to the swamp appears, paradoxically, to position it as the “machine,” or counterforce to the pastoral ideal and the illusion of escape—in Nick’s case, from war. The essay argues that Nick’s own psyche serves as this “machine” because he projects his buried anxieties onto the swamp. The mind as “machine” thus recalls the cyborg theory of Donna Haraway and the mind as “swamp” the ecopoetics of Gary Snyder. Ultimately, the metaphorical conflation of mind, machine, wilderness, and war (the source of Nick’s anxiety), further unsettles the civilization-nature binary that ecocriticism itself seeks to escape.

<i>The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the Fiction of Mobilization</i> (review)

To our significant if doomed scholarly efforts to unknot the complex tangle of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and war, we have new help in the form of Keith Gandal’s The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the Fiction of Mobilization. The crux of Gandal’s argument is threefold: (1) Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner experienced the U.S. mobilization for the Great War but were denied the manhood-conferring experience of proper combat service on a real front; (2) the military’s new meritocratic system gave ethnic Americans unprecedented opportunities to upstage “native” white Americans; and, finally, (3) the military’s campaign to prevent casualties from sexually transmitted diseases demonized female promiscuity while sanctifying manly restraint. These three issues converge in interesting if different ways in what Gandal calls the three writers’ mobilization (or postmobilization) racist promiscuity novels: The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, and The Sound and the Fury. Much of Gandal’s book performs the important task of introducing literary scholars to work being done by our historian colleagues and in doing a good deal of historical work himself. About ethnicity, Gandal makes the case that the Wold War I experience in training camps and the war itself was “arguably the first moment in American history when the socially and ethnically privileged are meeting the rest of the nation (minus blacks), not as servants, service people, employees, or charity cases, but rather on equal footing” (17). In particular, “the army’s new meritocratic personnel procedures, including but not limited to intelligence testing, gave leadership opportunities [such as officer rank to command immigrant companies] to educated ethnic Americans,” (18). I have always read the relationship between Gatsby’s veteran status and his obsession with Daisy in terms of a common trend among returning

Teaching Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (review)

What a remarkable moment to introduce A Farewell to Arms to students. The novel is quite possibly more relevant today than when it was published in 1929. Among other things, the novel forces us to ask ourselves how we use language to coerce, to convince, to mask, and to express our desires—desires between man and woman, between humankind and God, and between government and citizens. Students will inevitably consider Hemingway’s cautionary novel in the wake of an outgoing U.S. President who referred to the American struggle in Afghanistan as “exciting. . . in some ways romantic” and who vowed following the 4,000th death in Iraq to “make sure that those lives were not lost in vain” and that “there is an outcome that will merit the sacrifice.” To Frederic Henry, such comments would exemplify the obscene abstractions of wartime language. Students will recognize that in this novel written eighty years ago about a war that took place more than ninety years ago, Hemingway was addressing what Faulkner called “the old verities and truths of the heart.” Guiding us through approaches to teaching this novel in various levels of study, editor Lisa Tyler has given us Teaching Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (Kent State UP 2008). The book follows Teaching Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, edited by Peter L. Hays (U of Idaho P 2003). Tyler’s volume seems to be consciously more modest in scope than its predecessor: paperback, where the first was hardcover, containing fourteen instead of seventeen essays, and 257 pages instead of 403. The volume is usefully divided into four sections (although they occasionally overlap), each delineating a broad approach to the novel. Charles M. Oliver and Frederic J. Svoboda each contribute an essay to the first section, “Backgrounds and Contexts.” Oliver traces the Hemingway biography relevant to the novel, and includes a helpful chronology of the war and A Farewell to Arms. Svoboda, who had two essays in the Teaching The Sun Also Rises volume, describes how to contextualize the novel for students who might otherwise be unaware of its historical framework. Svoboda puts great emphasis on the “use and misuse of language” of such concern to Frederic Henry, and asserts, “Current events again have lent

Health and Civil War in Rural Burundi

Christian Asceticism and Barbarian Incursion: The Making of a Christian Catastrophe

Jerome integrated the barbarian attacks of 407 into a powerful narrative. His story of a “Thirty Years’ War” began with the crossing of the Danube in 376 and resulted in a single catastrophe: the fall of the western empire. In his writings, he gave meaning to the experience of war. His perception was determined by Christian eschatology, orthodoxy, and asceticism. Using traditional motifs and ascetic discourses, Jerome enforced Christian virtues and developed an interpretation that was able to establish social and religious consensus in a time of crisis and help to guarantee the social cohesion of Christian elite networks.

Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany: Cultural Code or Pervasive Prejudice?

S HULAMIT Volkov. Germans, Jews, and Antisemite,): Trials in Emancipation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xiii + 311.LARS FISCHER. The Socialist Response to Antisemitism in Imperial Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xix + 252.One of the most contentious issues in the historiography of the Holocaust is the question of origins: How far back does one look for causes? Answers range from the immediate context following the outbreak of World War II to the depths of the Middle Ages. But many, perhaps most, historians believe that one has to begin by examining the rise of "modern" anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany. Much has been written on this issue, but as we see by examining these two books from two different generations of scholars - a collection of essays, written over the course of thirty years, by Shulamith Volkov, one of the outstanding experts in the field; and the revised dissertation of Lars Fischer- interpretive consensus is still far off.Another question that has been asked repeatedly is the one that personally drives Volkov's scholarship: "Why was it so hard to see the approaching disaster?" Her essays are an attempt to evoke and analyze "the true complexity of the situation," the fact that "matters were indeed so obscure and so multidimensional that it was practically impossible, even for many clear sighted men and women, to see through and extract the ominous signs" (p. x). In the first of the three parts that make up the volume, Volkov offers an international perspective by outlining the differences of perception and opinion among Jews in the late nineteenth century and in the late 1930s. In the former period, Russia's Jews - obviously afflicted enough in their own country - looked anxiously at developments in Western and Central Europe, and what they saw pushed them even further toward Zionism. Conversely, German Jews did not believe that the conditions in the Tsarist Empire, however deplorable, could ever be replicated in their country. Forty years later, even after what we see in retrospect as the absolutely clear signal sent by Kriatainacht, blinders remained. Precisely because the events of November 1938 seemed so like a traditional pogrom, some observers actually believed that the Nazis represented nothing new after all: terrible and murderous, to be sure, but ultimately just one more old style enemy to be opposed and overcome. Moreover, many Zionists, however concerned about their brethren in the Third Reich, remained even more focused on fighting British restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine - an attitude encapsulated in Ben Gurion's notorious remark: "Had I know that it were possible to save all the children of Germany by bringing them over to England, or save only half of them by transferring them to Eretz Idrael, I would have chosen the latter" (p. 61).Volkov's honesty in dealing with the complexity of the issue extends even to her own family. In the remarkable prologue to the book, titled "My Father Leaves His German Homeland," she recounts how her father had always portrayed himself as a committed Zionist who decided to emigrate to Palestine as soon as Hitler came to power. But after his death, the family discovered letters that he had written from Germany in the spring and summer of 1933 to his fiancee - a native of Tel Aviv who had gone to Berlin to study medicine but returned home already in March 1933. The letters revealed his deep attachment to Germany and his agonizing over the decision to leave. Indeed, in the letter of May 2, Volkov's father (then twenty-five-years old) recounted hearing Hitler speak on the radio the day before and being swept up as by "a gigantic force of nature." He then asked plaintively: "Is there really no possibility at all for a Jew to take part in this thing here?" (p. T). Within the ensuing weeks he came to his senses and left for Palestine. Yet this troubling story sticks with the reader throughout the book and reminds us that there are no easy answers to the question: Why did people not see what was coming? …

War of Hearts: Love and Collective Attachment as Integrating Factors in Finland during World War II

Leading the World: The Role of Britain and the First World War in Promoting the “Modern Cremation” Movement

Regime Changes of Memory: Creating the Official History of the Ukrainian and Chinese Famines under State Socialism and after the Cold War