Homo Americanus: ERNEST HEMINGWAY, TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, AND QUEER MASCULINITIES

by John S. Bak

Overview

Though separated by only eleven years in age, Hemingway and Williams seem literary generations apart. Yet both authors bridged their modernist/postmodernist divide through mutual examinations of the polemics behind heteromasculinity, Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises and Williams in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. This book explores the two works many sociopolitical, literary, and intertextual ties, in particular how the conclusion of one echoes that of the other, not just in its irony but also in its implication of the audiences participation in engendering the social rules responsible for the protagonists struggle to negotiate his sexual identity. Hemingway's Sun shares more with Williams' Cat than just a similar ending, however. Both works explore more broadly the construction of a queer masculinity, where the parameters that define masculinity and sexuality grow as unstable and irresolute as the frontier during a war or the line of scrimmage during a football game.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611474299
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	12/01/2009
Pages:	306
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

John S. Bak is Associate Professor at Nancy-Université in France.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations 9

Acknowledgments 11

Introduction 17

1 Williams's Cat and Hemingway's Sun: Queerly Masculine 32

2 The Sun Also Sets: Jake Barnes, Impotence, and Sexual Existenialism 53

3 "A Dying Gaul": The Signifying Phallus and Williams's "Three Players of a Summer Game" 101

4 "sneakin' an' spyin'" from Broadway to the Beltway: Cold War Masculinity, Brick, and Homosexual Existentialism 130

5 The Impotence of Being Ernest: Scott and Hemingway's "Gender Trouble" in Williams's Clothes for a Summer Hotel 160

Conclusion 208

Notes 224

Bibliography 280

Index 294

Editorial Reviews

The effete Tennessee Williams (1911-83) and the burly Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) would seem to have little in common beyond their inclusion in the pantheon of American writers. Indeed, they met only once, their work spans different genres, and they are commonly placed in different literary generations. However, Bak (Nancy-Université, France) makes an interesting case for considering them together because of their mutual examination of hetero-masculine identity politics. In particular, he reframes the current understanding of Hemingway's influence on Williams, using Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises as a touchstone for revising the accepted vision of Cat on a Hot Roof's Brick before turning, in the final chapter, to Hemingway's posthumous writings to interpret Williams's later work. Bak makes much...of Jake Barnes as a precursor to Brick, but he also opens discussion of Williams's less-known works. This volume will be more interesting to Williams scholars than to Hemingway scholars, as Bak notes in his introduction. But it offers insight into Cold War America and the sexual politics that Williams challenged, in part through his connection to Hemingway as man and artist. Summing Up: Recommended.

Choice Reviews

John Bak's Homo Americanus is at once a narrow character study and a broad examination of American masculinity in the twentieth century....It is an ambitious work that demonstrates how much drama studies has to offer to the study of American literature.

Project Muse

The effete Tennessee Williams (1911-83) and the burly Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) would seem to have little in common beyond their inclusion in the pantheon of American writers. Indeed, they met only once, their work spans different genres, and they are commonly placed in different literary generations. However, Bak (Nancy-Université, France) makes an interesting case for considering them together because of their mutual examination of hetero-masculine identity politics. In particular, he reframes the current understanding of Hemingway's influence on Williams, using Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises as a touchstone for revising the accepted vision of Cat on a Hot Roof's Brick before turning, in the final chapter, to Hemingway's posthumous writings to interpret Williams's later work. Bak makes much...of Jake Barnes as a precursor to Brick, but he also opens discussion of Williams's less-known works. This volume will be more interesting to Williams scholars than to Hemingway scholars, as Bak notes in his introduction. But it offers insight into Cold War America and the sexual politics that Williams challenged, in part through his connection to Hemingway as man and artist. Summing Up: Recommended.

Choice

The effete Tennessee Williams (1911-83) and the burly Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) would seem to have little in common beyond their inclusion in the pantheon of American writers. Indeed, they met only once, their work spans different genres, and they are commonly placed in different literary generations. However, Bak (Nancy-Université, France) makes an interesting case for considering them together because of their mutual examination of hetero-masculine identity politics. In particular, he reframes the current understanding of Hemingway's influence on Williams, using Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises as a touchstone for revising the accepted vision of Cat on a Hot Roof's Brick before turning, in the final chapter, to Hemingway's posthumous writings to interpret Williams's later work. Bak makes much...of Jake Barnes as a precursor to Brick, but he also opens discussion of Williams's less-known works. This volume will be more interesting to Williams scholars than to Hemingway scholars, as Bak notes in his introduction. But it offers insight into Cold War America and the sexual politics that Williams challenged, in part through his connection to Hemingway as man and artist. Summing Up: Recommended.

CHOICE