When repositioned within the ambivalent beginnings of literary modernism, as well as within the genocidal history emerging at the time, the stillborn infant in Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms reveals the impossibility of assimilating the historical upheavals that he witnessed firsthand. Both the trench warfare of wwi and the 1915-1923 Armenian Genocide complicated for Hemingway the potential of modernity. This article proposes that we recast Hemingway's biography in terms of the tragic cultural moment during which he was writing and connect his figure of the dead, stillborn, and choking infant with the forces of history. Reading Hemingway's sense of history beside his dead infants suggests that what is choking is not simply Hemingway's infant, but also modernist discourse, and the criticism struggling to interpret it.
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