Maier Kevin - Teaching Hemingway and the Natural World

Ernest Hemingway is a writer we often associate with particular places and animals: Michigans Upper Peninsula, Spains countryside, East Africas game reserves, Cubas blue water, and Idahos sagebrush all come to mind. We can also easily picture the iconic images of Hemingway with fly rod bent by hefty trout, with bulls charging matadors in the background, or of the famous author proudly posing with trophy lions, marlin, and a whole menagerie of western American game animals. As Robert E. Fleming once put itupdating Gertrude Steins famous quip that Hemingway looked like a modern and smelled of museumsHemingway was also a hunter, fisherman, and naturalist who smelled of libraries (1). Hemingway indeed read widely in natural history and science, as well as the literature of field sports. This lifelong interest in the natural world and its inhabitants manifests itself in Hemingways writing in myriad ways. To be sure, from the trout Nick Adams carefully releases to Santiagos marlin, from Robert Jordans heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest to Colonel Cantwells beloved Italian duck marshes, and from African savannahs to the Gulf Stream, animals and environments are central to Hemingways work and life.

Since its origins, Hemingway scholarship has been marked by a robust treatment of these animals and environments. Malcolm Cowleys introduction to The Portable Hemingway focused on the fishing of Big Two-Hearted River, for example. Similarly, Phillip Youngs famous code-hero hypothesis arguably hinges on an understanding of hunting cultures rules of engagement for the natural world. In both these instances, and in much of the early scholarship, however, Hemingways representations of the natural world are mined for how they explain male psychology more than for how they suggest a particular relationship to the natural world or its inhabitants. While these representations often served as background for broader arguments related to more human-centered matters in early scholarship, more contemporary critics have opted to treat animals and environments directly. Flemings 1999 collection Hemingway and the Natural World offers an excellent foundation, but with the rapid emergence of environmental literary studies in the last two decades much work remains.

This collection aims not only to advance scholarship on Hemingways relationship to the natural world but also to facilitate bringing this scholarship to the classroom. Indeed, the goal of the Teaching Hemingway series is to present collections of essays on various approaches to teaching emergent themes in Hemingways major works to a variety of students in secondary schools and at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The goal of this particular volume of the series is to explore how teaching Hemingway might help shed light on broader questions about the human relationship to the nonhuman world. Organized geographically, each section that follows features two or three essays about Hemingways favorite places.

Despite our association of Hemingway with particular places and with the natural world more generally, his work is not often featured as part of the broader conversations about environmental literature. As the first two essays in the collection eloquently suggest, one potential reason for this gap might be explained by the way Hemingway represents environments. Indeed, in the first texts to be firmly established as canonical environmental literatureAldo Leopolds