User:Sherrilledwards/sandbox: Difference between revisions

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We start with Hemingway and ''In Our Time.''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} At the end of chapter two’s vignette, we read three sentences: “There was a woman having a kid with a young girl holding a blanket over her and crying. Scared sick looking at it. It rained all through the evacuation.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} The impact of war, fragmenting of form, juxtaposing of birth and death, distancing of trauma, the phrase ''scared sick looking'' stripped of its subject, the absence of any clear antecedent to the pronoun ''it,'' the naturalistic symbol of rain—combine in Hemingway’s language. Shaped by modern warfare, in a collage of disturbing images, here is Hemingway’s innovative rhetoric. In its way, ''In Our Time'' is as significant culturally as T. S. Eliot’s ''The Waste Land'', published three years earlier.{{sfn|Eliot|1922}} Matthew Stewart suggests that this “remains the most insistently experimental of all his books because it is the product of the one {{pg|332|333}}period of his life when he participated intently in a literary scene, and the temper of that milieu was distinctly modernist.”{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=12}}

Two decades later, a parallel to Hemingway’s rhetoric is Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead.''{{sfn|Mailer|1948}} Toward the end of the novel, we find two sentences: “Quite naturally he assumed the point and led the platoon toward the pass. A half hour later, Lieutenant Hearn was killed by a machine gun bullet which passed through his chest.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=602}} Like Hemingway, the language is sparse and fragmented, the tone objective. There is human rationality in one sentence and violent, irrational death in the next. Yet, the irrationality of Lt.Hearn’s death comes through the exercise of all too rational choices by others—those who designed and manufactured the machine gun and bullet, the Japanese soldier who fired the fatal shot, and the murderous machinations of Staff Sergeant Croft that led Hearn to that particular point.

Two decades later, a parallel to Hemingway’s rhetoric is Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead.''{{sfn|Mailer|1948}} Toward the end of the novel, we find two sentences: “Quite naturally he assumed the point and led the platoon toward the pass. A half hour later, Lieutenant Hearn was killed by a machine-gun bullet which passed through his chest.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=602}} Like Hemingway, the language is sparse and fragmented, the tone objective. There is human rationality in one sentence and violent, irrational death in the next. Yet, the irrationality of Lt.Hearn’s death comes through the exercise of all too rational choices by others—those who designed and manufactured the machine-gun and bullet, the Japanese soldier who fired the fatal shot, and the murderous machinations of Staff Sergeant Croft that led Hearn to that particular point.

The Great War was to be “the war to end all wars.” History demonstrated that proposition to be false. World War Two extrapolated dramatically the horrors of 1914–1918, particularly in the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Here is revealed a demonic rationality, applied with supreme efficiency to the killing of human beings—on a scale not before seen. Label it postmodern, post-Christian, or post-human, there is no doubt that the world described by Hemingway had—by the time of Mailer—become ''more'' irrational, sinister, and far darker. As goes the world, so goes literary form.

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 We start with Hemingway and ''In Our Time.''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}}  At the end of chapter two’s vignette, we read three sentences: “There was a woman having a kid with a young girl holding a blanket over her and crying. Scared sick looking at it. It rained all through the evacuation.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} The impact of war, fragmenting of form, juxtaposing of birth and death, distancing of trauma, the phrase ''scared sick looking'' stripped of its subject, the absence of any clear antecedent to the pronoun ''it,'' the naturalistic symbol of rain—combine in Hemingway’s language. Shaped by modern warfare, in a collage of disturbing images, here is Hemingway’s innovative rhetoric. In its way, ''In Our Time'' is as significant culturally as T. S. Eliot’s ''The Waste Land'', published three years earlier.{{sfn|Eliot|1922}} Matthew Stewart suggests that this “remains the most insistently experimental of all his books because it is the product of the one {{pg|332|333}}period of his life when he participated intently in a literary scene, and the temper of that milieu was distinctly modernist.”{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=12}}
-Two decades later, a parallel to Hemingway’s rhetoric is Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead.''{{sfn|Mailer|1948}} Toward the end of the novel, we find two sentences: “Quite naturally he assumed the point and led the platoon toward the pass. A half hour later, Lieutenant Hearn was killed by a machine gun bullet which passed through his chest.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=602}} Like Hemingway, the language is sparse and fragmented, the tone objective. There is human rationality in one sentence and violent, irrational death in the next. Yet, the irrationality of Lt.Hearn’s death comes through the exercise of all too rational choices by others—those who designed and manufactured the machine gun and bullet, the Japanese soldier who fired the fatal shot, and the murderous machinations of Staff Sergeant Croft that led Hearn to that particular point.
+Two decades later, a parallel to Hemingway’s rhetoric is Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead.''{{sfn|Mailer|1948}} Toward the end of the novel, we find two sentences: “Quite naturally he assumed the point and led the platoon toward the pass. A half hour later, Lieutenant Hearn was killed by a machine-gun bullet which passed through his chest.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=602}} Like Hemingway, the language is sparse and fragmented, the tone objective. There is human rationality in one sentence and violent, irrational death in the next. Yet, the irrationality of Lt.Hearn’s death comes through the exercise of all too rational choices by others—those who designed and manufactured the machine-gun and bullet, the Japanese soldier who fired the fatal shot, and the murderous machinations of Staff Sergeant Croft that led Hearn to that particular point.
 The Great War was to be “the war to end all wars.” History demonstrated that proposition to be false. World War Two extrapolated dramatically the horrors of 1914–1918, particularly in the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Here is revealed a demonic rationality, applied with supreme efficiency to the killing of human beings—on a scale not before seen. Label it postmodern, post-Christian, or post-human, there is no doubt that the world described by Hemingway had—by the time of Mailer—become ''more'' irrational, sinister, and far darker. As goes the world, so goes literary form.