Flaubertian Aesthetics, Modernist Ethics and Animal Representation in Hemingway's Green Hills of Africa

Abstract

Abstract Hemingway's Green Hills of Africa is widely deplored for its portrayal of trophy hunting. Acknowledging the accusations, I question their ethical conclusions by drawing on recent work in narrative ethics in order to consider how animals are treated not only in the narrative but also by the narrative. Animals uniquely test the ethics of representation; to address this aesthetic and ethical challenge, Hemingway appropriates techniques adaptable from Flaubert's principled commitment to the mot juste and authorial impersonality. The result is a highly mimetic, often ineloquent style that complicates any simple negative reading of his stance toward animals. Attending to Hemingway's stylistic practices opens his writing to more nuanced interpretations of his narrative ethics; it also helps situate his work with other modernist attempts to represent animals as beings inaccessible to human ways of thinking, yet not beyond ethical consideration.

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