Hemingway from Aristotle’s Perspective

Why writing about this topic will be beneficial to me: I chose to examine Hemingway’s “ Hills Like White Elephants from Aristotle’s perspective. This will benefit me because I will analyze a piece of 20th century writing from a historical perspective that has been used to define western literature up until the 20th century, which will allow me to understand the different writing processes during the 20th-century literary shift.

My Working Thesis: When Ernest Hemingway’s story “Hills Like White Elephants” is viewed from the perspective of Aristotle, it is evident that 20th-century literature changed the notion of what is good literature based on Ethos or character, Lexis or speech, and Mythos or plot. Aristotle’s examination of “Hills like White Elephants based on these three criteria would state that Hemingway’s existentialist story is not good, although that is clearly not true.

Approach to the subject of my paper: First of all, I will need to introduce the concepts of Ethos, Lexis, and Mythos from Aristotle’s perspective and define them from his point of view. I will then provide a brief explanation of Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” and then briefly explain how his story differs from Aristotle’s understanding of these three terms. After introducing and explaining the topic, I will give in-depth paragraph explanations as to how these terms are used by Aristotle and how Hemingway is writing from a different definition than Aristotle. To conclude the paper, I will explain exactly what the paper has discussed and prove that Aristotle’s notions of Ethos, Lexis, and Mythos are different than the way Hemingway thought of them.

Work Cited

Hemingway, Ernest. "Hills Like White Elephants." The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New York: Scribner, 1987. 211-14. Print.