Teaching Hemingway and Faulkner in Unison

by Professor Walker Rutledge

Editor’s note: We received a letter upon request from Professor Walker Rutledge of Western Kentucky University, who visits the Hemingway Museum and Birthplace Home yearly with his English honors class. In the letter he explains his teaching methodology in pairing Hemingway and Faulkner. We hope to get more news from Professor Rutledge after his presentation at the International Hemingway Conference in Spain. Teaching Hemingway and Faulkner in Unison

As the Director of the English Honors Program here at Western Kentucky University, I developed a course entitled “Honors Hemingway and Faulkner,” and I have taught this class each fall for over a decade. Having discovered long ago that literature most fully comes to life for students when they can actually establish an identity with the author’s time, place, and culture, I wanted to build into the course two field trips—one to Hemingway’s home in Oak Park, Illinois, and one to the Faulkner sites in Oxford, Mississippi. Thanks to the University’s commitment to student engagement and to the generosity of the University Honors Program, we have been able to schedule a Hemingway Weekend and a Faulkner Weekend each year. As weathered as the expression may be, the effect of these fieldtrips upon the students can only be called “immeasurable.” The material comes to breathe in a way it never would otherwise.

As for my particular instructional approach of pairing Hemingway with Faulkner, this is a pedagogical technique that I first began using in American literature classes. With so much of the cultural and intellectual history encapsulated by duos—think Jefferson and Hamilton, or Grant and Lee—I thought that the same approach might work well with literary figures. Indeed it did! My first pairings were Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin, then Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.

But nowhere has this approach been more successful than with America’s two most famous Nobel Laureates—Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. By studying Faulkner, one can more fully appreciate what Hemingway is doing; by studying Hemingway, one can more fully appreciate what Faulkner is doing. The two play off each other like no one else.

Recently I have been gratified to learn that others have shown an interest in this approach. At the 12th Biennial International Hemingway Conference this summer, I have been invited to deliver a paper entitled “Hemingway and Faulkner: Using One to Teach the Other.” I shall certainly be recording my impressions at Malaga and Ronda.

Walker Rutledge, Assistant Professor

Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, Kentucky

This article was originally published in Hemingway Foundations Dispatch Spring 2006