Research projects

Building on my archival research from which I observed that Ernest Hemingway's influence on Ralph Ellison was particularly heavy in the 1930s, I began to pay closer attention to the cultural significance of 1930s America on Ellison and Hemingway, especially on Hemingway's novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). The novel not only features one of the chief messages of 1930s left culture, a message of anti-lynching, it also foregrounds proletarians in the figures of Spanish guerillas in much the same manner as the cultural and literary works of 1930s America, the age of FDR's New Deal when cultural representations most prominently spotlighted the "people." Thus I have concluded that what Hemingway did in that novel can be more fully acknowledged when we compare it with the vernacular in the 1930s.