Modernist composing techniques and the linguistic sign: A study of the early works of Ernest Hemingway (1921-1924)

"Modernist Composing Techniques and the Linguistic Sign: A Study of the Early Works of Ernest Hemingway (1921-1924)" explores Hemingway's development of a Modernist poetic prose style in his earliest professional publications, and suggests how this style influenced his composing strategies in important later works like The Sun Also Rises. As a result, this study complicates and supplements earlier critical studies which argue that Hemingway writes in the Realistic/Naturalistic tradition. In particular, it focuses on Hemingway's use of Modernist composing strategies which approximate montage and collage, and demonstrates how these strategies operate within a "general semiotics" of the arts. Hemingway's early works are particularly rich in synecdoche and metonymy, the two figures which predominate in Cubism and cinema according to Roman Jakobson. Hemingway had apparently learned the strategies of Cubism and the cinema from Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, who developed and applied their literary equivalents in works like Three Lives and The Cantos.