At Slate, Nathan Heller talks about our collective obsession with Ernest Hemingway, saying the late writer has become the literary equivalent to the Nike Swoosh. He attributes this to a high school curriculum heavy in Hemingway and Shakespeare–the reason why these are the two English-language writers “every high-school student in this country reads.” (Eh?)
He’s also popular because he’s the anti-Portlandia sketch.
“Hemingway is due for reappraisal partly because his gamey, war-seeking, booze-quaffing corpus seems today quixotically out of sync with our twee and environmentally aware era; the Hemingway we think we know is a Zeus-hued action figurine from another time and place.”
This is commentary on Hemingway fetishism by way of Hemingway fetishism, which is really meta, and probably something that Hemingway would have hated.
Right?
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