Hemingway Review Blog

Ron Berman writes about "Books in the Background" of Hemingway scholarship in this new series of posts for the Hemingway Review blog.  He will tackle all kinds of books that contribute to richer understanding of the context in which Hemingway lived and wrote.  In this installment, he looks at books related to The Great War.

Greg Forter’s insightful chapter on The Sun Also Rises, in his book Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism, employs René Girard’s conception of sacrificial violence to suggest that bullfighting in the novel becomes “Hemingway’s fantasmatic … way of imagining a society that knows how to displace, ritualize, and thereby regulate its own violence, rather than wreaking it devastatingly on the bodies of its members” (80). As Spain sat out the World War, one might reasonably see the bullfight as prophylactic—until Spanish society’s internal violence erupted with a vengeance in the civil war of the 1930s.

The Fall 2016 issue begins with a remarkable front cover, which features an untitled watercolor by Hemingway’s friend, the writer and painter John Dos Passos. As the note in the issue by Donald Pizer argues, the painting presents a macho Hemingway rushing to aid an injured Donald Ogden Stewart at an amateur bullfight-related spectacle during the 1924 Pamplona fiesta.  I am very pleased that Don, a scholar renowned for his work on Dos Passos and Hemingway, chose the Review to showcase this incredible find!  A larger color version of this painting will be posted on this blog.  Check back soon.