GLAMOROUS (PRE)OCCUPATIONS ON THE LEFT BANK: HEMINGWAY AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES

Abstract

Following the trajectory of scholars such as Phyllis Frus, Lawrence Rainey, Aaron Jaffe, Sean Latham, and Judith Brown, I study the convergence of journalism?as the space of print capitalism par excellence?and the celebrity writer in earlier twentieth century modernity. I have selected the work of Hemingway, Orwell, and Miller as focal points. Their involvement with Left Bank journalism as newsmen, their expatriation, and the plenitude of genres they utilise in their writing, provide invaluable connections between material contexts and aesthetic concerns. I trace developments in mass media?namely yellow journalism and the rise of tabloid newspapers, the creation and maintenance of segregated reading publics?and suggest that they are related to concurrent parallelisms in modernist works, which deploy similar tactics and genres. Such genres add the styles of sensationalism, voyeurism, and confession to the modernist aesthetic, while also dealing with the professional writer?s complicities with print capitalism.