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=**Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway**=





This wiki space provides several entrance activities for students to assist in their ability to access and understand the text "Hills Like White Elephants//"// by Ernest Hemingway. It was created as an example of how to potentially get past or preempt the "I hate this poem/story!" problem when students are faced with challenging texts. This 'home' page provides an introduction to the story and the author as well as including some basic entrance activities/ideas. We suggest you begin by reading the story itself, which you can access via the link above. Some additional information on the author and the story as well as some additional activities to be employed with this text are linked below.

The second half of this home page contains several videos depicting a variety of interpretations of this story. We would suggest showing these to students for discussion after reading and discussing the story as a class. Showing the videos first would give the students someone else's perspective and interpretation of the story and may make it harder for them to find their own meanings and interpretations. We suggest that the subtext activities presented on the Behind the Lines page should be where the student experience begins, ending with the videos on this page. We have also provided our own interpretations and analysis as we worked through understanding the story ourselves. This can be found on the Literary Analysis page.



Iceberg theory and Hemingway's style

Context of the Story

White Elephant History

**Videos for Instruction:**
Below are samples of the numerous depictions of this story available for view on Youtube. These videos could easily be used as aids for students to make meaning of this text, however it might be best to start with another entrance activity and save the videos for discussions on the variety of meanings that are possible through interpretations of the subtext.

media type="youtube" key="WI9krJkRqV4" width="425" height="350"
 * 1) A version clearly created by film students/amateur movie makers, but which stays relatively true to the original text in its original order and progression:

2. A somewhat romantic take which is relatively true to the original text, though the lines are re-arranged significantly and scenes alternate between the couple talking in bed and the story's original setting of a bar at a train station: media type="youtube" key="jAjJ4HE6woc" width="425" height="350"

3. A very modern adaptation with some original lines, but much has been re-written to fit the context of the film: media type="youtube" key="TIA_k5G7stQ" width="425" height="350"