Oak Park, Illinois greatly influenced the writing world on July 12,1899. For on that day Grace Hemingway, the wife of Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, gave forth to the writing world a baby boy by the name of Ernest Miller Hemingway (Young 82). He would, later in his life, compose the most powerful literary impact upon the new generation of American writers with his plain, factual, but evocative style (Morris 863). No one in America would ever influence the writing world like Hemingway.
At a very young age it was apparent to those around him that Hemingway really was something special. Many marveled at how he was able to create such a dynamic story. Not many knew at the time that the majority of his ideas for his writings were coming from his own personal experiences. For example, he always wrote of death by violence in his writings, and this came to him through the hunting trips with his father (The Cycle of American Literature 200). The violence he witnessed out there in the fields with his father influenced him enough to write a detailed story of such conduct. The events to transpire throughout Hemingway’s life would allow him to write short stories unimaginable to the average person.
Throughout Ernest’s life, one of the most influential aspects was his wartime experiences. They included World War I, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and a hostile confrontation with Fidel Castro. Because of his involvement in these numerous wars, Hemingway endured more scars than any other man in or out of uniform (Rusche 1). In World War I, he chose the American Ambulance corps for his wartime experience. Despite his life threatening injury, which occurred in World Wa…
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Stirling, Nora. Who Wrote the Modern Classics? New York: The John Day Company, 1970.
“The Hemingway Code.” Experimental Cyberschool Web Server. 13 April 2000 .
Theodoracopulos, Taki. “Putting on the Ritz.” National Review 7 November 1994: 80-81.
Unger, Leonard, ed. “Ernest Hemingway.” American Writers. Vol. 2. New York: Charles Scribners’s Sons, 1974. 247-269.
“War.” Encyclopedia Britannica. 15th edition. 1993.
Weeks, Robert p., ed. Hemingway. Englewood Cliff, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1962.
“The World Wars.” Encyclopedia Britannica. 15th edition. 1993.
Young, Philip. “Hemingway, Ernest.” Encyclopedia Americana. International edition. 1990.
The White Male Fantasy of Total Recall
The White Male Fantasy of Total Recall
After saving the planet from a ruthless dictator and barely avoiding death on the hills of Mars, Douglas Quaid (Schwarzenegger) puts a final spin on Total Recall with his final lines: “I just had a terrible thought. What if this is all a dream?” This last statement by Quaid leaves the audience pondering the question of reality, wondering what truly was ‘real.’ By the end of the film, one could easily argue a whole realm of possibilities: The events were all real; they were all a dream; they were the Recall implant fantasy played out; or they were the Recall fantasy gone haywire. In addition, the film seems to reject imperialism and the domination of white males, also rather postmodern in ideology. What is most ironic about this apparent postmodernism of resistance that we see at the surface of the film is undermined by high modernist ideology that recalls metanarratives of a patriarchal past. Thus we actually get the high modernist ideology that the film appears to reject. For every progressive step that Total Recall takes forward, then, it takes two steps back, and by the end of the film we see not a progressive victory, but rather a white male fantasy of the return of the patriarchal world in which the white man is on top.
According to Andreas Huyssen, “The postmodern harbored the promise of a ‘post-white,’ ‘post-male,’ ‘post-humanist,’ and ‘post-Puritan’ world” (194). While I am not purporting to predict the future, one would assume that if postmodern ideology continued on, then the future would continue the gender and racial role deconstruction that began in the mid to late 1960’s. But Total Recall does not keep this promise, as there is nothing post-white, post-male, post-humanist or post-Puritan about it, and racial and gender codes, rather than being deconstructed, are actually reconstructed. In fact, Total Recall’s world, produced in 1990, written in 1975, and representing 2084, looks much more like George Orwell’s 1949 depiction of the world 1984 than any futuristic postmodern world. When Orwell created his future, it was based on projections of the present, and so whites and males still ruled the earth, and communist-like governments ruled the earth. In Total Recall, though, we do not see a projected future based on trends of our present, but rather one that reconstructs the past cultural dominant of white patriarchy, and seems to want to project from the early 1900’s.