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"Berman, Ronald"
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Fitzgerald-Wilson-Hemingway
In this study, Ronald Berman examines the work of the
critic/novelist Edmund Wilson and the art of F. Scott
Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway as they wrestled with the
problems of language, experience, perception and reality in the
\"age of jazz.\" By focusing specifically on aesthetics—the
ways these writers translated everyday reality into
language—Berman challenges and redefines many routinely
accepted ideas concerning the legacy of these authors.
Fitzgerald is generally thought of as a romantic, but Berman
shows that we need to expand the idea of Romanticism to include
its philosophy. Hemingway, widely viewed as a stylist who
captured experience by simplifying language, is revealed as
consciously demonstrating reality's resistance to language.
Between these two renowned writers stands Wilson, who is
critically influenced by Alfred North Whitehead, as well as
Dewey, James, Santayana, and Freud. By patiently mapping the
correctness of these philosophers, historians, literary critics
and writers, Berman aims to open a gateway into the era. This
work should be of interest to scholars of American literature,
philosophy and aesthetics; to academic libraries; to students
of intellectual history; and to general readers interested in
Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Wilson.
eBook
Fitzgerald-Wilson-Hemingway : language and experience
\"In this study, Ronald Berman examines the work of the critic/novelist Edmund Wilson and the art of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway as they wrestled with the problems of language, experience, perception, and reality in the 'age of jazz.' Fitzgerald is generally thought of as a romantic, but Berman shows that we need to expand the idea of Romanticism to include its philosophy. Hemingway, widely viewed as a stylist who captured experience by simplifying language, is revealed as consciously demonstrating reality's resistance to language. Between these two renowned writers stands Wilson, who is critically influenced by Alfred North Whitehead, as well as Dewey, James, Santayana, and Freud. By patiently mapping the connectedness of these philosophers, historians, literary critics, and writers, Berman aims to open a new gateway into the era.\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Fitzgerald’s War: Bryan Dalyrimple, Josephine Perry, Pat Hobby, and the Politics of Disillusionment
Although F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fiction includes a number of combatants in the Great War, the global conflagration does not interest him primarily as a theater of combat. Rather, whenever war is discussion in his work, other social issues are implied—namely, disillusion and indifference. In the early short story “Dalyrimple Goes Wrong,” the veteran’s real shell shock occurs when he discovers that military service does not open the doors to upward mobility, and he finds opportunity only in a life of crime (that ironically eventuates a political career). In Josephine Perry stories such as “First Blood,” “A Snobbish Story,” and “Emotional Bankruptcy,” the war is remote history even as it is ongoing; the obligations of patriotism quickly sink into the great Sahara of American apathy. Finally, even in late Pat Hobby stories like “Two Old-Timers,” war is revealed to be nothing more than a flickering cinematic simulacrum of bravery that shapes both cultural and personal memory, a delusion that only insiders like Fitzgerald’s screenwriting hack know is engineered. Reading these three overlooked texts against the backdrop of commentary by H. L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, and R. H. Tawney, this article argues that the cynicism of the interwar years did not begin in the battlefields but in the parlors, backrooms, and studio back lots of the home front.
Journal Article
The Basil Stories and Social Education
F. Scott Fitzgerald's stories about Basil Duke Lee have become source material for biographers, who have built up a solid picture of communal life in the Midwest and of educational life in the prep schools of the East. The stories have a good deal more to say about ideas that affected youth culture before the Great War. Basil is put into a number of culturally dramatic situations: how to adjust to the new realities of the twentieth century, which meant recognizing the enormous role now played by institutions. He has to think about things like the \"power\" that is to be gained on campus, power that has not much to do with intellectual ability. And he has to come to grips with the ways in which such power is obtained. The Basil stories show a series of decisions. They show social life during the 1910s as a matter of activities and events-and also as a system of rules to be profitably obeyed or ruinously disregarded.
Journal Article
Modernity and progress : Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Orwell
Breaks new critical ground by exploring philosophical and aesthetic issues germane to the writings of three major modern literary figures. In the 1920s and ‘30s, understandings of time, place, and civilization were subjected to a barrage of new conceptions. Ronald Berman probes the work of three writers who wrestled with one or more of these issues in ways of lasting significance. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Orwell all grappled with fluid notions of time: Hemingway’s absolute present, Fitzgerald’s obsession with what might be and what might have been, and Orwell’s concerns with progress. For these authors, progress is also tied to competing senses of place--for Fitzgerald, the North versus the South; for Hemingway, America versus Europe. At stake for each is an understanding of what constitutes true civilization in a post-war world. Berman discusses Hemingway’s deployment of language in tackling the problems of thinking and knowing. Berman follows this notion further in examining the indisputable impact upon Hemingway’s prose of Paul Cézanne’s painting and the nature of perception. Finally, Berman considers the influence on Orwell of Aristotle and Freud’s ideas of civilization, translated by Orwell into the fabric of 1984 and other writings. Ronald Berman is Professor of English at the University of California at San Diego and past chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is author of six books, including “The Great Gatsby” and Fitzgerald’s World of Ideas and Fitzgerald-Wilson-Hemingway: Language and Experience.
eBook
Complex Fortune: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Piketty, and Capital in the Basil and Josephine Stories
This article applies the theories of wealth and income inequality popularized in French economist Thomas Piketty's recent Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) to the Basil and Josephine stories that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote between 1928 and 1931. As a student of the relationship between inherited and acquired wealth and the social concerns generated from the tension between them, Fitzgerald is as ideal a writer for contemporary commentators to explore the evolving notion of capital in modern society as European novelists such as Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac upon whom Piketty focuses. In particular, the quintet of Saturday Evening Post tales about Chicago debutante Josephine Perry that Fitzgerald published in 1930–31 capture a new kind of public scrutiny in which pressures from the outside world are exerted on the family. Individual stories in the series such as “A Snobbish Story” document how civic institutions like the opera and the theater demand support and provide respectability, opening up new forms of class mobility that threaten the upper-class presumption of a lineage of taste, style, and beliefs founded in tradition. Josephine's expectations have been hitherto founded on the logic of social order: her family represents the community, and in a fairly exalted way. Post-1914 concepts about social association threaten that logic, however, and Josephine exhibits the jitteriness of a world absorbing new forms of identity that are epitomized by her romantic antagonist John Boynton Bailey. Capturing the erosion of cultural patronage and the insurgence of new ideas of moral relativism, Fitzgerald brought the nineteenth-century novel of money up to date.
Journal Article