Two Versions of Modernism: The Short Fiction of Hemingway and Faulkner

Literary works by Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, both Nobel Prize winning modernist authors born two years apart, are often perceived as radically different. Aside from the choice of themes, the most apparent is the contrast in their writing styles. Implementing his iceberg theory, Hemingway experimented with simple and short sentences, making elimination the major process of writing. Faulkner went in the opposite direction, frequently employing the stream of consciousness technique, culminating in the creation of the once longest sentence in literature. It is thus no wonder that the two authors had dissonance between themselves. Faulkner criticized Hemingway for having “no courage,” not using words that might “cause the reader to check with a dictionary”; Hemingway on the other hand questioned Faulkner’s use of “big words” and noted his lack of artistic discipline.

It is, however, inaccurate to reduce the relationship between Faulkner and Hemingway merely into that of mutual negation. In their lifetime they only met once and rarely corresponded with each other, but the two authors were tremendously conscious of each other’s works and made an extensive mutual impact. Through the close textual analysis of Faulkner’s and Hemingway’s short stories and with attention to their shared historical background and literary influence, this course introduces students to the rather complicated intertextual relationship between the works by the two pillers of American modernism.