Negotiating the self: Recreation, identity, and Hemingway
Description
This project is a cultural study of the intersection between recreation and identity in the life and work of Ernest Hemingway. Using two distinct, but related meanings of recreation---first, in the sense of the concrete and actual physical activities and pastimes such as bullfighting, big game hunting, and fishing that Hemingway adamantly pursued and second, in the sense of the more personal and abstract process of regeneration or explorations of the self---I explore the way his recreational spaces and activities resonate with the enterprise of his personal regeneration and self-construction The goal of the project is to revisit the traditionally conservative terrain of recreation, which is often read as a confirmation of Hemingway's masculine, rugged persona (an impression created powerfully and consistently by the majority of his work) in order to examine Hemingway's increasingly transgressive use of recreation in his later works, particularly the posthumously published The Garden of Eden (1986) and True at First Light (1999). The highly controversial revelations---both personal and artistic---in these posthumously published works suggest that recreation serves as a space for Hemingway to explore identity and the processes of identity construction through performance. Ultimately he emerges from this process with a profound critique of his own persona as well as a more general critique of Western notions of unified and coherent selfhood Whereas in the past, masculinity and authenticity have been key terms in critical approaches to Hemingway and his work, my project foregrounds performance over authenticity and explores the way Hemingway's conceptions of masculinity are deeply connected to turn-of-the-century anxieties about race and gender. As a result, I seek to complicate and disrupt the image of Hemingway's masculinity in popular and critical discourse and to bring to light the contradictions and inconsistencies that animate his career and representations of self