Expatriation as Laboratory in Ernest Hemingway’s and James Baldwin’s Parisian Memoirs

Abstract

This paper explores the themes of expatriation and identity in Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son. It examines the meaning and the function of expatriation and how it relates to the search for personal identity for both American writers by looking at the intertext of their Parisian memoirs. It shows how these transatlantic authors strategically use expatriate space as a laboratory to reconstruct personal identity as individuals and as artists via the high level of intellectualism self-exile stimulates in a social context characterized by alienation.