User:Sherrilledwards/sandbox: Difference between revisions

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Stoneback’s argument is plausible. Yes, Hemingway’s rhetoric is always unsentimental, open-ended, embedded in modernity: that is hard to dispute. Cleanth Brooks said Hemingway confined himself to“his secular terms.”{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} I think that he went further. Granted, in Hemingway there is no parallel to T. S. Eliot’s pilgrimage from the agnosticism of ''The Waste Land'' (1922) to the faith of ''Four Quartets'' (1943). But then most of the Modernists felt unable to follow Eliot in his particular journey. Nor is there any equivalent to Mailer’s final book, ''On God'' (2007), his “quest into the nature and context of ‘reality,’ particularly non-material entities”—in effect “Mailer’s metaphysics.”{{sfn|Sipiora|2008|p=503}}

If Hemingway had not encountered physical and psychological problems, if his memory had not been gravely impaired, what at the end would he have written? We can never know what ''might'' have been. But Stoneback puts it well, “Pilgrimage, the notion and motion of spiritualized travel, is at the center of Hemingway’s religious vision and his work from his earliest stories to the final, unfinished and posthumously published novels and memoirs.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=49}} With great skill, and with a high degree of indeterminacy,Hemingway’s rhetoric appears poised between the language-game of God and that of modernism. Some claim the two games are inherently incompatible. I argue otherwise.

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	Stoneback’s argument is plausible. Yes, Hemingway’s rhetoric is always unsentimental, open-ended, embedded in modernity: that is hard to dispute. Cleanth Brooks said Hemingway confined himself to“his secular terms.”{{efn\|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.”{{sfn\|Buske\|2002\|p=87-88}}}} I think that he went further. Granted, in Hemingway there is no parallel to T. S. Eliot’s pilgrimage from the agnosticism of ''The Waste Land'' (1922) to the faith of ''Four Quartets'' (1943). But then most of the Modernists felt unable to follow Eliot in his particular journey. Nor is there any equivalent to Mailer’s final book, ''On God'' (2007), his “quest into the nature and context of ‘reality,’ particularly non-material entities”—in effect “Mailer’s metaphysics.”{{sfn\|Sipiora\|2008\|p=503}}		Stoneback’s argument is plausible. Yes, Hemingway’s rhetoric is always unsentimental, open-ended, embedded in modernity: that is hard to dispute. Cleanth Brooks said Hemingway confined himself to“his secular terms.”{{efn\|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.”{{sfn\|Buske\|2002\|p=87-88}}}} I think that he went further. Granted, in Hemingway there is no parallel to T. S. Eliot’s pilgrimage from the agnosticism of ''The Waste Land'' (1922) to the faith of ''Four Quartets'' (1943). But then most of the Modernists felt unable to follow Eliot in his particular journey. Nor is there any equivalent to Mailer’s final book, ''On God'' (2007), his “quest into the nature and context of ‘reality,’ particularly non-material entities”—in effect “Mailer’s metaphysics.”{{sfn\|Sipiora\|2008\|p=503}}

			If Hemingway had not encountered physical and psychological problems, if his memory had not been gravely impaired, what at the end would he have written? We can never know what ''might'' have been. But Stoneback puts it well, “Pilgrimage, the notion and motion of spiritualized travel, is at the center of Hemingway’s religious vision and his work from his earliest stories to the final, unfinished and posthumously published novels and memoirs.”{{sfn\|Stoneback\|2003\|p=49}} With great skill, and with a high degree of indeterminacy,Hemingway’s rhetoric appears poised between the language-game of God and that of modernism. Some claim the two games are inherently incompatible. I argue otherwise.