Hemingway’s sentence-craft aestheticizes nonalienated work under industrial capitalism

Evidence

From this central point in Hemingway’s creation all the rest can be deduced: the experience of sentence-production is the form taken in Hemingway’s world by nonalienated work. Writing, now conceived as a skill, is then assimilated to the other skills of hunting and bullfighting, of fishing and warfare, which project a total image of man’s active and all-absorbing technical participation in the outside world. … Such an ideology of technique clearly reflects the more general American work situation, where, in the context of the open frontier and the blurring of class structure, the American male is conventionally evaluated according to the number of different jobs he has had, and skills he possesses. The Hemingway cult of machismo is just this attempt to come to terms with the great industrial transformation of America after World War I: it satisfies the Protestant work ethic at the same time that it glorifies leisure; it reconciles the deepest and most life-giving impulses toward wholeness with a status quo in which only sports allow you to feel alive and undamaged. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 783

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Lukács’s concept of reification and the commodification of labor — Hemingway’s technique-reads-as-work is the aesthetic corollary of the reified labor the Frankfurt School theorized. — connects to: Art and play no longer model nonalienated labor under late capitalism — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 354; Romanticism and medievalism are defense mechanisms against industrial capitalism — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 195

Broader Connections

• Art and play no longer model nonalienated labor under late capitalism #corroborates (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 354
• Romanticism and medievalism are defense mechanisms against industrial capitalism #corroborates (0.70) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 195