Hemingway.doc

段娇，2 0814142151.Hemingways Development to a New Writing StyleErnest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. Nicknamed Papa, he was part of the 1920s expatriate community in Paris known as the Lost Generation, as described in his memoir A Moveable Feast. He led a turbulent social life, was married four times, and allegedly had various romantic relationships during his lifetime.citation needed For a serious writer, he achieved a rare cult-like popularity during his lifetime. Hemingway received the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. During his later life, Hemingway suffered from increasing physical and mental problems. In July 1961, he commited suicide by shooting himself.Hemingways distinctive writing style is characterized by economy and understatement and had a significant influence on the development of twentieth-century fiction writing. His protagonists are typically stoic males who must show grace under pressure. Many of his works are now considered canonical in American literature. A. The Writing Style of Modern European Literature During 19th CenturyThe 19th century is the century of greatest change in the European literary circles in that this is the period when a new colloquial writing style was born which was created by Mark Twain, whose use of vernacular speech revolutionized he language of American fiction. But obviously, it is only Ernest Hemingway that inherited and developed his colloquial style. As Milan Kundera said, in the early 19th century the novels were carefully structured with a series of scenes by Scott, Balzac (Milan Kundera 134). In his opinion, their novels were full of specific description, scenes, dialogues and plots which are usually seen in the drama. Looking back to the European literary history in the 19th century, a fact is evident to readers that the novels of all the writers, excepting Mark Twain, were full of long and complex sentences, blooded adjectives and adverbs, etc. In fact, the one who had read the novels of Balzac or Henry James, who were the representative writers of that century, will get the fact that Balzac tends to portray the outer actuality and the image of the figures carefully and Henry James likes to show his ability in superposing the modifiers. Their descriptions are undoubtedly specific and elaborate, but to some extent, tedious and boring. The novels in the 19th century are inclined to describing specifically and deeply with rich elaborate details about the outside or objective environment. It seems that if a novel lacks of any of the elements mentioned above, it would not be considered as a successful one. Therefore, after narrating a whole story, a novel with hundreds of thousands of words even millions of words is born. In fact, such writing style is very popular in the literary circles at that time when reading novels to be certainly a good method to amuse people. But with time goes on, literature also needs new blood to fill in to keep up with the development of the society and to meet the needs of people, who are gradually busy in pursuing wealth and have no enough time and spirit to spend in reading the too long and too difficult novels. With such time coming, the style of conciseness is asked forto meet the needs of new times. It is just Hemingway that has changed the traditional tedious writing style into a type of new concise style, purifying the literary language. B. The Formation of Hemingways New and Unique Writing StyleHemingways style is characterized by short and simple real-life dialogues, concise language with very few adjectives and adverbs, deliberate omission and so on, instead of the tedious style of the 19th century. Among so many writers, Hemingway becomes the only one person who has successfully developed a new writing style in Modern European Literature; there are several reasons for it. First of all, as mentioned before, in 1917, Hemingway worked as a journalist for the Kansas City Star, which is one of the best newspapers in American at that time. This newspaper asks for using short sentences, vivid and active language and reporting directly, so Hemingway learned that writing style should be trained as life. Of course, this experience benefits the formation of his so-called “telegraph style” greatly. Secondly, being under the illusion that the war is fine and attractive, Hemingway began his experience as a soldier in the First World War, even later in other wars, but in the battlefields, he was seriously hit. Bloody war shatters his dream; meanwhile, it provides him not just a wounded body and a hurt heart, but the rich sources of writing. So, for what he usually expresses in his works, he was viewed as the representative of the “lost generation”. Therefore, as a spokesman of the “lost generation”, Hemingway has already had a kind of unique style of his own. And, Hemingways success is related to the helps from other famous writers. Such as, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Fitzgerald and so on, who give much indications and guidance on his writing. Furthermore, he absorbed the colloquial language of Mark Twain. Because of all the elements, the feature of Hemingways writing style is gradually appearing. C. The Influence of Hemingways Writing StyleNoted for his unique writing style and devotion to the literature, Hemingway has exerted considerable influence on the later novelists. The writer, Wu Xiaodong, reckons him as a writer who deeply affected other writers. His concise language, short and simple sentences purify the American literature, and his colloquial style is very popular in European and American literary circles since the late 20th century. John OHara, who made a memorial speech for Hemingway on the New York T