Katherine Anne Porter, Paris 1935-1936, from the Papers of Katherine Anne Porter, University of Maryland Libraries Special Collections)
This week we have two authors and two stories that are very different from each other, but both were written during the modern period and both stories demand careful reading and consideration. Review the Modernism list before reading these stories.
Katherine Anne Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” uses a method of storytelling known as “stream-of-consciousness.” This method was used most famously by another well-known modernist writer named William Faulkner. In stream-of-consciousness writing, the author tries to recreate a chronology of ideas and emotions as if they were coming straight from the mind of a character (like a “stream” of ideas and emotions flowing from the character’s “consciousness”), including all the jumbled jumps from one idea to another and the lack of explanation concerning context and history that occurs as we think and feel. Of course, this is very confusing to read, but, as the modernists would argue, it may be a more accurate picture of reality than that descriptive approach to outward reality that we saw in the realists.
To see this method in action, follow the Porter list.
Ernest Hemingway is also a modernist; in fact, it is safe to call him a “high modernist,” meaning that he is the very epitome of literary modernism in many ways. These ways include both his writing and his life–even to the troubling end. In “Hills Like White Elephants”, readers may find themselves with the opposite problem from the problem they have reading “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall.” Instead of dealing with a tidal wave of seemingly unconnected pieces of information as occurs in Porter’s story, in “Hills Like White Elephants” readers may feel that they get no real information at all. One has to read between the lines in Hemingway and explore the symbols and the choice of words very carefully to grasp what the story is about.
Hemingway is well known for both his short stories and novels. Along with “Hills Like White Elephants,” his story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” is perhaps the most often anthologized. His novels include The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls,A Farewell to Arms, and the novella The Old Man and the Sea.
To learn more about his life and to read one short story, follow the Hemingway list.
After reading for this week, go to the Week Fifteen Assignments blog posting for the week’s activities.
We’ll investigate it together and come to a resolution.
