English 104 - Cora Agatucci
Introduction to Literature: Fiction

~  IV  ~
Modernist Fiction:
Hemingway, Faulkner, Kafka
[Fall 2001 ENG 104 Course Pack ~ p. 40]  

“The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a nightmare,
that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves. . . .
a book should serve as an ax for the frozen sea within us.”
--Franz Kafka (1883-1924)

“It is [the poet’s, the writer’s] privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart,
by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride
and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.
The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man,
it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”
William Faulkner, 1949 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

"This [letter] is to tell you about a young man named Ernest Hemmingway [sic],
who lives in Paris,...and has a brilliant future....
I'd look him up right away. He's the real thing."
--F. Scott Fitzgerald to his editor Max Perkins (1924)
Picturing Hemingway: A Writer in His Time (Smithsonian Institution):
http://www.npg.si.edu/exh/hemingway/ess-index2.htm 

“I always write on the principle of the iceberg.
There are seven-eights of it under water for every part that shows.
Anything you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg.
It is the part that doesn’t show.”
Ernest Hemingway (1958)

 “I remember [John] Gardner telling me [in Creative Writing 101],
‘Read all the Faulkner you can get your hands on, and
then read all of Hemingway to clean the Faulkner out of your system.’”
Raymond Carver (1958/1983)

“Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trash in [a novel]
and be excused for it.  In a short story that's next to the poem,
almost every word has got to be almost exactly right.
In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can't.
I mean by that the good short stories like Chekhov wrote.
That's why I rate that [the short story] second [right after poetry]—
it's because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude.”
--William Faulknerhttp://www.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~egjbp/faulkner/stories.html  

“That’s all we [writers] have, finally, the words,
and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places
so that they can best say what they are meant to say . . .
[I]f used right, they can hit all the notes.”
--Raymond Carver “On Writing” (1981)

Fall 2001 ENG 104 Syllabus | Course Plan | Course Pack Table of Contents | Assignments | Site Map
ENG 104 Author Links Table of Contents  | (1)  A - E  | (2)   F - L  | (3)   M - Z
Literature Links | Contexts: Literary History & Movements | Genre Studies: Fiction
ENG 104 Course Home Page

YOU ARE HERE ~ Section II. Emergence of the Short Story Genre
from ENG 104 Course Pack Table of Contents ~ Fall 2001
URL of this webpage:
http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/eng104/coursepack/IV_Modern.htm 
Last Updated:  11 September 2003


This webpage is maintained by Cora Agatucci, Professor of English,
Humanities Department, Central Oregon Community College
I welcome comments: cagatucci@cocc.edu
© Cora Agatucci, 1997-2001
Cora's Home Page | Current ScheduleCora's Classes | CopyrightSite Map

For problems with this web, contact webmaster@cocc.edu