Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner with Wai Chee Dimock - 2. Hemingway's In Our Time

Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner (AMST 246) Professor Wai Chee Dimock discusses Hemingway's first book In Our Time, a collection of vignettes published in 1925 that launched Hemingway's career as a leading American modernist. Professor Dimock examines a cluster of three vignettes from In Our Time to show how Hemingway's laconic style naturalizes problems of pain and violence amidst the ethnic tensions of the American Midwest. Drawing on the theoretical writings of critics Elaine Scarry and Susan Sontag, and the artistic representations of painter Edvard Munch, Professor Dimock shows how language probes the empathetic boundaries of communal suffering in "Indian Camp" and "Chapter II." She concludes with a discussion of "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife" that shows how inter-ethnic conflict between Native Americans and whites is neutralized by the primitive impulse of peacekeeping, the opposite of the violence she reads in the two other vignettes in this cluster. 00:00 - Chapter 1. In Our Time Publication History 03:41 - Chapter 2. The Structure of In Our Time 07:57 - Chapter 3. A Possible Cluster 10:56 - Chapter 4. Theoretical Persepctives on Pain 18:29 - Chapter 5. A Close Reading of "Indian Camp" 27:33 - Chapter 6. A Close Reading of "Chapter II" 35:50 - Chapter 7. A Close Reading of "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife" 48:42 - Chapter 8. Meditations on Pain and Violence in the Proposed Cluster Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://oyc.yale.edu This course was recorded in Fall 2011.