South Atlantic Modern Language Association
November 2-4, 2018
Birmingham, Alabama
The Hemingway Society Session
THINGS FALL APART: ERNEST HEMINGWAY AND THE GREAT WAR
On November 11, 1918, the Great War finally ended.
In 1919 William Butler Yeats's "The Second Coming" was first published. The opening stanza contains the most frequently quoted lines of modern poetry written in English-lines 3-4.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
In 1919 nineteen-year-old Ernest Hemingway returned to America on crutches, arriving that fall in Petoskey, Michigan, where he labored to become a writer of fiction.
That same year, the Treaty of Versailles was signed. The Eighteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution was ratified. The death toll from the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic continued to escalate. Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio was published. James Branch Cabell's Jurgen was published, and soon banned for indecency. H L Mencken's The American Language was published. Shakespeare and Company was founded. The Algonquin Round Table began.
The 2018 SAMLA takes place close to the 100th anniversary of the ending of the Great War. The Hemingway Session will mark that momentous event.
We invite papers that explore the meanings of the Great War as revealed in the writing of Ernest Hemingway-his fiction, poetry, journalism, essays. Yeats's instantly famous lines and the cited highlights of 1919 open a world of possibilities for that exploration.
Please send abstracts by June 1, 2018, to jflora@email.unc.edu
SAMLA 2018 November 2-4, Sheraton Birmingham, Birmingham, Alabama