User:Sherrilledwards/sandbox

This book is fiction. But there is always a chance that such a work of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact. —Ernest Hemingway (A Moveable Feast 230)

[I]t is the author’s contention that good fiction—if the writer can achieve it—is more real, that is, more nourishing to our sense of reality, than non-fiction. . . . novelists have a unique opportunity—they can create superior histories out of an enhancement of the real, the unverified, and the wholly fictional. —Norman Mailer (Harlot’s Ghost 1287–8)

What is the rhetoric of modernism? Is the Modern novel “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God” (Lukács 88)? If so,why do religious themes still appear? Are they the Cheshire Cat’s grin, nostalgic echoes of a vanished age, cosmic footprints left in the wasteland of Modernity? Or are they rumors of grace? How does God-language function in the work of Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) and Norman Mailer (1923–2007)?