- Title
- Making an Example Out of Ernest Hemingway and His Corresponding Postcards
- Author/Creator
- Bradley D. Clissold
- Publication Details
- Rereading Modernist Postcards: Critical Studies in Materialist Recovery, pp.37-93
- Annotation
- Chapter laments the invisibility of postcard correspondence in Baker's Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, thus denying "the material performability of postcards, especially the rich interwoven significations of their mass-produced and user-inscribed materialities." Argues that, among other editing failures committed by Baker, the devaluation of the postcard correspondence is an egregious omission for scholarly consideration of the development of Hemingway's style and communications and the relation of his frequent use of condensed language to the cramped form of the postcard. Highlights examples of "postcardese" in passages from The Sun Also Rises and other works and refers to Hemingway's own mentions of significant postcards sent and received and which Baker generally overlooked and excluded from Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters. "Hemingway's repeatedly invoked absent presences of epistolary materialities haunt Baker's book of select correspondence, throwing into constant critical relief what is at stake in choosing to omit postcard materialities." A second part surveys the Letters volumes, which notably include postcards and other forms of correspondence, though, the author finds, not without some arguably unhelpful or incomplete annotations." "[I]t soon becomes clear that the editors repeatedly privilege the aesthetic appearances of postcards in their facsimile reproductions over access to significant material features that Hemingway himself draws self-conscious attention to in his inscribed messages." Part III traces the importance to Hemingway of "missive materialities" with detailed examples from various works, including "My Old Man," "A Way You'll Never Be," "The Natural History of the Dead," The Sun Also Rises, and A Farwell to Arms.
- Publisher
- Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group; New York
- Academic Unit
- Hemingway Bibliography
- Resource Type
- Book chapter
- Record Identifier
- 991015213188003691
Book chapter
Making an Example Out of Ernest Hemingway and His Corresponding Postcards
Rereading Modernist Postcards: Critical Studies in Materialist Recovery, pp.37-93
Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
2024
Appears in Hemingway Bibliography
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