Qarshi davlat universiteti xorijiy tillar fakulteti ingliz tili va adabiyoti kafedrasi

 
 
Seminar №11 
Literature of the Lost Generation- Ernest Hemingway 
FAREWELL TO ARMS BY HEMINGWAY OR OLD MAN AND 
THE SEA 
Plan 
1.
Sherwood Anderson. 
2.
Francis Scott Fitzgerald 
3.
Ernest Hemingway 

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Case Study 
Introduction: The term “Lost Generation” 
The “Lost Generation” refers to expatriated American writers who were 
living in Paris after World War I. Ernest Hemingway was one of these 
writers. He was working as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star at 
the time. The majority of the writers in the “Lost Generation” were 
veterans of World War I. They had seen and done terrible things which left 
them devastated after the war was over. They returned to a country that was 
ready to forget about the war and in many ways the soldiers who fought in 
it. They were unable to adjust to a changing world. This created the 
environment for a new form of literature. The literature during this time 
would be much different than the pre-war literature. The works created 
were not as optimistic as before, almost pessimistic in many cases. This 
was due to the fact that these writers had endured many hardships in their 
lives that were of no fault of their own. Ernest Hemingway was not only 
considered a part of the “Lost Generation” movement, he also helped create 
it. The term, “Lost Generation”, was created by Gertrude Stein, who was a 
friend of Hemingway. According to Hemingway, Stein was at a mechanic 
shop where her car had been poorly repaired. The shop owner told the 
mechanic he was a lost generation. She then told Hemingway that he was 
also part of the “Lost Generation”. The generation was generally perceived 
to be careless and heavy drinkers. This definition definitely fit 
Hemingway’s personality. He later used the term in “The Sun Also Rises”, 
which was a significant work of Ernest Hemingway.
The “Lost Generation” had a major role in the short story becoming a 
respected form of literature. Before this time short stories were not 
considered profitable, but the writers of this time were able to write stories 
that were not only good literature but could make money. The short story 
had become very popular and this was due to the American writers of the 
“Lost Generation”.
Although Hemingway was not the only writer of the "Lost Generation", he 
is the one most associated with it. Other than the mechanic, he was also the 
first one labeled with this title. 
Exercise 1 . 
Answer to the questions 
1. 
What do you think what was the reason that they could not adapt in 
their own country? 
2. 
Why the novels were about blue times of life? 
3. 
Count the representatives of “The Lost Generation” ? 
4. 
Why this period of literature was called “Lost Generation”? 
5. 
What was the role of “Lost Generation” in literature? 
6. 
Hemingway chose this term as an epigraph to one of his novels, 
which novel it was and why he chose this term? 

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7. 
Express your own ideas about this period. 
Ernest Hamingway 
Ernest Hemingway served in World War I as an ambulance driver on the 
Italian front and was, in fact, injured. He married and moved to Paris with 
his first wife, quickly becoming a part of the expatriate community. He is 
most well known for his style of writing. While his stories are gripping, it is 
his break from traditional narrative that makes him unique. Sparse in 
language, and skilled in his use of silence, dialogue and action, Hemingway 
made deliberate choices to break from the flowery language of the past, the 
very language that defined a very different time. He was mentored by none 
other than Gertrude Stein. 
The New York Times wrote in 1926 of Hemingway's first novel, "No 
amount of analysis can convey the quality of The Sun Also Rises. It is a 
truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard, athletic narrative prose that puts 
more literary English to shame." The Sun Also Rises is written in the spare, 
tight prose that made Hemingway famous, and, according to James Nagel, 
"changed the nature of American writing." In 1954, when Hemingway was 
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, it was for "his mastery of the art of 
narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for 
the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style." Paul Smith writes 
that Hemingway's first stories, collected as In Our Time, showed he was 
still experimenting with his writing style. He avoided complicated syntax. 
About 70 percent of the sentences are simple sentences- a childlike syntax 
without subordination.
But if a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may 
omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly 
enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer 
had stated them.
Exercise 2. 
Match the sentences as true “T”(if a sentence truly coincide with the text), 
false “F”(if the information in the sentence is not correct), not given “NG”( 
if there is no information about, in the text)
1. 
According to the analysis Ernest Hemingway’s novel “The Sun also 
rises” is the best work. 
2. 
In 1954 Hemingway was awarded a Nobel prize. 
3. 
He served as a driver on Italian front. 
4. 
Fortunately he was safe and was not injured. 
5. 
He has exerted on contemporary style. 
6. 
At the war times Hemingway was awarded for not leaving his 
companions to die even though he himself was seriously injured. 
7. 
Gertrude Stein was his close friend. 
8. 
Paul Smith thinks that Hemingway’s works’ 70 percent of the 

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sentences are simple sentences- a childlike syntax without subordination, 
and are a shame for the American literature.
9. 
After his marriage he and his wife left to Paris 
10. 
He is unique because he was the first to break from traditional 
writing style. 
Exercise 3 
Find definitions to the underlined words in the text below. 
Themes 
The popularity of Hemingway's work to a great extent is based on the 
themes, which according to scholar Frederic Svoboda are love, war, 
wilderness and loss, all of which are strongly evident in the body of work. 
These are recurring themes of American literature, which are clearly evident 
in Hemingway's work. Critic Leslie Fiedler sees the theme he defines as 
"The Sacred Land"—the American West—extended in Hemingway's work 
to include mountains in Spain, Switzerland and Africa, and to the streams of 
Michigan. The American West is given a symbolic nod with the naming of 
the "Hotel Montana" in The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls. 
According to Stoltzfus and Fiedler, Hemingway's nature is a place for 
rebirth, for therapy, and the hunter or fisherman has a moment of 
transcendence when the prey is killed. Nature is where men fish; men hunt; 
men find redemption in nature. Although Hemingway writes about sports, 
Carlos Baker believes the emphasis is more on the athlete than the sport, 
while Beegel sees the essence of Hemingway as an American naturalist, as 
reflected in such detailed descriptions as can be found in "Big Two-Hearted 
River". 
Fiedler believes Hemingway inverts the American literary theme of the evil 
"Dark Woman" versus the good "Light Woman". The dark woman—Brett 
Ashley of The Sun Also Rises—is a goddess; the light woman—Margot 
Macomber of "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber"—is a 
murderess. Stoltzfus considers Hemingway's work to be more complex with 
a representation of the truth inherent in existentialism: if "nothingness" is 
embraced, then redemption is achieved at the moment of death. Those who 
face death with dignity and courage live an authentic life. Francis 
Macomber dies happy because the last hours of his life are authentic; the 
bullfighter in the corrida represents the pinnacle of a life lived with 
authenticity. In his paper The Uses of Authenticity: Hemingway and the 
Literary Field, Timo Müller writes that Hemingway's fiction is successful 
because the characters live an "authentic life", and the "soldiers, fishers, 
boxers and backwoodsmen are among the archetypes of authenticity in 
modern literature". 
Some critics have characterized Hemingway's work as misogynistic and 
homophobic. Susan Beegel analyzed four decades of Hemingway criticism, 
published in her essay "Critical Reception". She found, particularly in the 

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1980s, "critics interested in multiculturalism" simply ignored Hemingway; 
although some "apologetics" have been written. Typical is this analysis of 
The Sun Also Rises: "Hemingway never lets the reader forget that Cohn is a 
Jew, not an unattractive character who happens to be a Jew but a character 
who is unattractive because he is a Jew."
Hemingway’s works. 
One of the representatives of Hemingway’s works is “The sun also rises”. 
To this story Ernest Hemingway chose the term “Lost generation” through 
which he wanted to express the difficulty in manners of the youth who had 
served in World War I . The Veterans returning home couldn’t adapt to the 
changing country after war time. Through novel it is clear why Hemingway 
used the term “Lost Generation”. Let me show that in wider case. 
Themes-Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a 
literary work. 
“The Aimlessness of the Lost Generation” 
World War I undercut traditional notions of morality, faith, and justice. No 
longer able to rely on the traditional beliefs that gave life meaning, the men 
and women who experienced the war became psychologically and morally 
lost, and they wandered aimlessly in a world that appeared meaningless. 
Jake, Brett, and their acquaintances give dramatic life to this situation. 
Because they no longer believe in anything, their lives are empty. They fill 
their time with inconsequential and escapist activities, such as drinking, 
dancing, and debauchery. 
It is important to note that Hemingway never explicitly states that Jake and 
his friends’ lives are aimless, or that this aimlessness is a result of the war. 
Instead, he implies these ideas through his portrayal of the characters’ 
emotional and mental lives. These stand in stark contrast to the characters’ 
surface actions. Jake and his friends’ constant carousing does not make 
them happy. Very often, their merrymaking is joyless and driven by alcohol. 
At best, it allows them not to think about their inner lives or about the war. 
Although they spend nearly all of their time partying in one way or another, 
they remain sorrowful or unfulfilled. Hence, their drinking and dancing is 
just a futile distraction, a purposeless activity characteristic of a wandering, 
aimless life. 
Motifs-Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can 
help to develop and inform the text’s major themes. 
“The Failure of Communication” 
The conversations among Jake and his friends are rarely direct or honest. 
They hide true feelings behind a mask of civility. Although the legacy of the 
war torments them all, they are unable to communicate this torment. They 
can talk about the war only in an excessively humorous or painfully trite 
fashion. An example of the latter occurs when Georgette and Jake have 

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dinner, and Jake narrates that they would probably have gone on to agree 
that the war “would have been better avoided” if they were not fortunately 
interrupted. The moments of honest, genuine communication generally arise 
only when the characters are feeling their worst. Consequently, only very 
dark feelings are expressed. When Brett torments Jake especially harshly, 
for instance, he expresses his unhappiness with her and their situation. 
Similarly, when Mike is hopelessly drunk, he tells Cohn how much his 
presence disgusts him. Expressions of true affection, on the other hand, are 
limited almost exclusively to Jake and Bill’s fishing trip. 
“Excessive Drinking” 
Nearly all of Jake’s friends are alcoholics. Wherever they happen to be, they 
drink, usually to excess. Often, their drinking provides a way of escaping 
reality. Drunkenness allows Jake and his acquaintances to endure lives 
severely lacking in affection and purpose. Hemingway clearly portrays the 
drawbacks to this excessive drinking. Alcohol frequently brings out the 
worst in the characters, particularly Mike. He shows himself to be a nasty, 
violent man when he is intoxicated. More subtly, Hemingway also implies 
that drunkenness only worsens the mental and emotional turmoil that 
plagues Jake and his friends. Being drunk allows them to avoid confronting 
their problems by providing them with a way to avoid thinking about them. 
However, drinking is not exclusively portrayed in a negative light. In the 
context of Jake and Bill’s fishing trip, for instance, it can be a relaxing, 
friendship-building, even healthy activity. 
“False Friendships” 
False friendships relate closely to failed communication. Many of the 
friendships in the novel have no basis in affection. For instance, Jake meets 
a bicycle team manager, and the two have a drink together. They enjoy a 
friendly conversation and make plans to meet the next morning. Jake, 
however, sleeps through their meeting, having no regard for the fact that he 
will never see the man again. Jake and Cohn demonstrate another, still 
darker type of false friendship. Although Cohn genuinely likes Jake, Jake 
must often mask outright antagonism toward Cohn, an antagonism that 
increases dramatically along with Jake’s unspoken jealousy of Cohn over 
his affair with Brett. At one point, he even claims to hate Cohn. This 
inability to form genuine connections with other people is an aspect of the 
aimless wandering that characterizes Jake’s existence. Jake and his friends 
wander socially as well as geographically. Ironically, Hemingway suggests 
that in the context of war it was easier to form connections with other 
people. In peacetime it proves far more difficult for these characters to do 
so. 
Symbols-Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to 
represent abstract ideas or concepts. 
“Bullfighting” 
The bullfighting episodes in The Sun Also Rises are rich in symbolic 

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possibilities. The multiple possible interpretations of these passages speak 
to the depth and complexity of the text. For example, nearly every episode 
involving bulls or bullfighting parallels an episode that either has occurred, 
or will soon occur, among Jake and his friends. The killing of the steer by 
the bull at the start of the fiesta, for instance, may prefigure Mike’s assault 
on Cohn. Alternatively, we can read this incident as prefiguring Brett’s 
destruction of Cohn and his values. Furthermore, the bullfighting episodes 
nearly always function from two symbolic viewpoints: Jake’s perspective 
and the perspective of postwar society. For instance, we can interpret the 
figure of Belmonte from the point of view of Jake and his friends. Just as 
Cohn, Mike, and Jake all once commanded Brett’s affection, so too did 
Belmonte once command the affection of the crowd, which now discards 
him for Romero. In a larger context, Belmonte can symbolize the entire 
Lost Generation, whose moment seems to have passed. 
Exercise 4 
Here is given a small part of the plot of the novel “The Sun also rises”. 
Skim through the text and analyze , divide into small groups and show your 
own opinion about the situation and characters. 
The Sun Also Rises opens with the narrator, Jake Barnes, delivering a brief 
biographical sketch of his friend, Robert Cohn. Jake is a veteran of World 
War I who now works as a journalist in Paris. Cohn is also an American 
expatriate, although not a war veteran. He is a rich Jewish writer who lives 
in Paris with his forceful and controlling girlfriend, Frances Clyne. Cohn 
has become restless of late, and he comes to Jake’s office one afternoon to 
try to convince Jake to go with him to South America. Jake refuses, and he 
takes pains to get rid of Cohn. That night at a dance club, Jake runs into 
Lady Brett Ashley, a divorced socialite and the love of Jake’s life. Brett is a 
free-spirited and independent woman, but she can be very selfish at times. 
She and Jake met in England during World War I, when Brett treated Jake 
for a war wound.
The next morning, Jake and Cohn have lunch. Cohn is quite taken with 
Brett, and he gets angry when Jake tells him that Brett plans to marry Mike 
Campbell, a heavy-drinking Scottish war veteran. That afternoon, Brett 
stands Jake up. That night, however, she arrives unexpectedly at his 
apartment with Count Mippipopolous, a rich Greek expatriate. After 
sending the count out for champagne, Brett tells Jake that she is leaving for 
San Sebastian, in Spain, saying it will be easier on both of them to be apart. 
Several weeks later, while Brett and Cohn are both traveling outside of 
Paris, one of Jake’s friends, a fellow American war veteran named Bill 
Gorton, arrives in Paris. Bill and Jake make plans to leave for Spain to do 
some fishing and later attend the fiesta at Pamplona. Jake makes plans to 
meet Cohn on the way to Pamplona. Jake runs into Brett, who has returned 
from San Sebastian; with her is Mike, her fiancé. They ask if they may join 

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Jake in Spain, and he politely responds that they may. 
Bill and Jake take a train from Paris to Bayonne, in the south of France, 
where they meet Cohn. The three men travel together into Spain, to 
Pamplona. They plan on meeting Brett and Mike that night, but the couple 
does not show up. Bill and Jake decide to leave for a small town called 
Burguete to fish, but Cohn chooses to stay and wait for Brett. Bill and Jake 
travel to the Spanish countryside and check into a small, rural inn. They 
spend five pleasant days fishing, drinking, and playing cards. Eventually, 
Jake receives a letter from Mike. He writes that he and Brett will be arriving 
in Pamplona shortly. Jake and Bill leave on a bus that afternoon to meet the 
couple. After arriving in Pamplona, Jake and Bill check into a hotel owned 
by Montoya, a Spanish bullfighting expert who likes Jake for his earnest 
interest in the sport. Jake and Bill meet up with Brett, Mike, and Cohn, and 
the whole group goes to watch the bulls being unloaded in preparation for 
the bullfights during the fiesta. Mike mocks Cohn harshly for following 
Brett around when he is not wanted. 
After a few more days of preparation, the fiesta begins. The city is 
consumed with dancing, drinking, and general debauchery. The highlight of 
the first day is the first bullfight, at which Pedro Romero, a nineteen-year-
old prodigy, distinguishes himself above all the other bullfighters. Despite 
its violence, Brett cannot take her eyes off the bullfight, or Romero. A few 
days later, Jake and his friends are at the hotel dining room, and Brett 
notices Romero at a nearby table. She persuades Jake to introduce her to 
him. 
Through reading, comprising some of the works of the most well-known 
writers we may notice some common themes in works of literature by 
members of the Lost Generation include: 
Decadence - Consider the lavish parties of James Gatsby in Fitzgerald's The 
Great Gatsby or those thrown by the characters in his Tales of the Jazz Age. 
Recall the aimless traveling, drinking, and parties of the circles of 
expatriates in Hemingway'sThe Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast. 
With ideals shattered so thoroughly by the war, for many, hedonism was the 
result. Lost Generation writers revealed the sordid nature of the shallow, 
frivolous lives of the young and independently wealthy in the aftermath of 
the war. 
Idealised past - Rather than face the horrors of warfare, many worked to 
create an idealised but unattainable image of the past, a glossy image with 
no bearing in reality. The best example is in Gatsby's idealisation of Daisy, 
his inability to see her as she truly is, and the closing lines to the novel after 
all its death and disappointment: 
"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year 
recedes before us. It eludes us then, but that's no matter- to-morrow we will 

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run faster, stretch our arms farther... And one fine morning… So we beat 
on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."