International Programs

I have chosen to discuss Ernest Hemingway's expatriate experience in France during the 1920s because it is one that parallels my own time spent in France as a college student in Avignon during the latter part of my higher education career. I know that my choice to spend three months studying abroad in Southern France was the result of my need for a more global perspective about my life and higher education. I wanted to gain knowledge about French language and culture that would help broaden my opportunities for a career that I hope will be internationally focused. After completing my English degree, I feel I have come away with many valuable skills that have arisen out of my knowledge of literature and foreign exchange, and one of these is the ability to break down any text I am given and find a way to relate it to my own experiences both at home and abroad. I often look to my experience living in France as a reference of understanding other cultures more clearly, and I am drawn to studying the life and writing of Hemingway because he seemed to have gone to France as a young man with similar goals as mine. In one sense, Europe offers to us young Americans a broader sense of history and culture than in America because its countries are what we drew our own heritage and traditions from. By going to Europe and studying the cultures there, we are able to learn more about ourselves by seeing the building blocks for our own American culture. Thus, I think when I was given the chance to live in France, I took the opportunity knowing I would be a different person when I came back; influenced by the French people, language, and history, just as Hemingway never really returned to his old self as an American, instead he was an "American living in France."