"It was all a nothing and man was nothing too". Ernest Hemingway's modernist short fiction and its bounds to modern philosophy

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Würzburg (Philosophisches Institut 1), course: Modernism, Amerikanistik, language: English, abstract: ¿There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and

bleed.¿1 This quote of Ernest Hemingway already is a portent of what his writing is

about. It is personal; so very personal that he even uses the metaphor of his own

blood for describing it. Deep in meaning, it emerged out of his inner life and was

brought to paper just like that. And his style is reflecting this perfectly- it is plain and

easily readable with a much broader and more complex meaning underneath the

surface. However, before bleeding, one had usually got hurt, for there must be a

wound. This wound can be seen as the background of his writings, namely the

Modernist era with its fundamental uncertainty of the individual, its threat of the

First World War, its new theories in psychology and its complex philosophical basis.

This work is concerned with how Hemingway adapted to this time and its changes

and how he was influenced by the contemporary philosophy; all in all: with the ways

in which Hemingway is seen as a Modernist author. [...]