The Ernest Hemingway Society
American Literature Association Conference
May 26-29, 2022
Chicago, IL
PANEL 1: Teaching the Power of Place and Setting in Ernest Hemingway’s Writing
In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway describes his practice of writing in Parisian cafés, noting: “Some days it went so well that you could make the country so that you could walk into it through the timber to come out into the clearing and work up onto the high ground and see the hills beyond the arm of the lake.” His satisfaction with the results of his work points to his efforts to evoke a sensory experience of place in his settings through descriptions that are immersive and vibrant, inviting readers to see themselves in the countryside, bars, fishing boats, and intimate rooms of his narratives.
The power of Hemingway’s settings is not lost on those who admire his work. As Terry Tempest Williams remarked in her keynote address to the seventh Hemingway Conference, “Ernest Hemingway has been a powerful mentor, in terms of what it means to create a landscape impressionistically on the page.” Indeed, for long-time Hemingway readers and scholars, his descriptions of setting and place are recognized as fundamental components of his craftsmanship and markers of his dedication to literary excellence.
When it comes to teaching Hemingway to students who may not be as familiar with his work, however, how do we teach students to excavate the layers of meaning and understand the purposefulness of style and diction that make up his evocations of setting?
While this is not a new question, as recent scholarship, such as Kevin Maier’s Teaching Hemingway and the Natural World, has provided many useful ways to examine Hemingway’s natural settings in the classroom, this panel seeks to continue and build on these discussions. Focusing on natural and man-made settings and places, panelists will offer additional pedagogical perspectives and useful tools and technologies for teaching setting and place in Hemingway’s life and work.
Potential paper topics might include:
- Defining place (or placelessness) in Hemingway’s settings
- Hemingway’s style and sentence structure in the description of place and setting
- Utilizing tools and technologies in the classroom like ArcGIS software or virtual tours
- The role of Cafés, Bars, Restaurants, or other types of places in Hemingway’s work
- Representation of places in the natural world and ecocritical readings of setting
- The influence of Hemingway’s lived experiences on his literary representations of place and setting
- Examinations and comparisons of cities and rural places in Hemingway’s work
- Travel and movement in relation to setting and place
- Digital geographies and the mapping of place in Hemingway’s work
- Feelings of belonging and exclusion associated with place and setting
- The role of crowds and isolation in Hemingway’s representations of place and setting
- Comparing manuscripts and using archival material in discussions of Hemingway’s descriptions of setting
- The rhetoric of and moral treatment of places in Hemingway’s work
Please direct your 250-350 word proposal and a short bio to Kayla Forrest (kmforres@uncg.edu). The deadline for proposals is January 23. Papers are generally limited to 15 minutes.
Additional details about the 2022 ALA Conference may be found online at: https://americanliteratureassociation.org/ala-conferences/ala-annual-conference/
For more information about the Ernest Hemingway Society, please visit the Society’s website at: www.hemingwaysociety.org.
PANEL 2: Documenting the Author: Examining the Role of and Impact of Author-Based Documentaries
This past April, the highly anticipated documentary, Hemingway (2021), premiered on PBS, coupled with watch parties and much discussion of reactions to the film. The reception of the documentary spurred debate, provided new perspectives of Hemingway through visual footage and images, and perhaps most importantly, presented the author’s life and work to a public audience, inviting both casual and dedicated readers to watch and learn.
While Hemingway is one of the more recent documentaries to air, the past several years have seen a flurry of author-based documentaries, include Gabo: The Creation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez (2015), Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (2017), Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am (2019), Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir (2021), and I Am Not Your Negro (2016), to name a few. Though these documentaries vary in form and approach to the subject’s life and work, they seem to share the goal of attracting a wide, public audience, inviting viewers to read and re-read the authors whose lives are represented on screen. The consistent release of these films also invites a discussion of their role in bridging the gap between scholarship and the everyday reader, along with the challenges and potential pitfalls that accompany their production and reception.
This panel will present a conversation on author-based documentaries, broadly and specifically, with the goal of discussing both individual documentaries, and how they paint a living portrait of the authors they take for subjects, and the role of these author-based documentaries more broadly, including problems and questions surrounding their production and rhetorical moves and the possibilities for reaching and informing a broad audience.
Although this panel is sponsored by the Ernest Hemingway Society, we invite papers that focus on the recent Hemingway documentary AND those that focus on other author-based documentaries, or treatments of author-based documentaries at large.
Potential paper topics might include:
- The purposes of author-based documentaries and their involvement in shaping, revising, disputing, or otherwise revisiting an author’s life and work
- The public-facing nature of author-based documentaries and the impact they have on readership and scholarship
- Challenges and disappointments of author-based documentaries
- Glamorizing or “Hollywoodification” of an author’s life
- The use of author-based documentaries in classrooms and educational settings
- The use of textual selections and scholarship in author-based documentaries
- Major similarities or significant differences between various author-based documentaries
- The treatment of (or even creation of) controversy related to an author’s life and work
Please direct your 250-350 word proposal and a short bio to Kayla Forrest (kmforres@uncg.edu). The deadline for proposals is January 23. Papers are generally limited to 15 minutes.
Additional details about the 2022 ALA Conference may be found online at: https://americanliteratureassociation.org/ala-conferences/ala-annual-conference/
For more information about the Ernest Hemingway Society, please visit the Society’s website at: www.hemingwaysociety.org.
Kayla Forrest, kmforres@uncg.edu