Language, emotion, and imagination: Constructing human identity through Hemingway's work

<p>This thesis examines how Hemingway’s use of language evokes emotions in his stories and how his particular way of evoking emotions affects readers. Hemingway’s style of providing vivid experiences for readers centers on the image as the dimension where emotions are offered, but also the dimension where the writer’s work converges with the reader’s reception of it. The reader reconstructs the text through the act of signifying emotions. This process of signification is made possible only through the use of the reader’s imagination. The study of the relation between emotion and imagination emphasizes that readers decode fiction as they decode reality: in the way it affects them.</p> <p>In the act of reading narrative fiction--as this thesis demonstrates--human beings enhance their identities in the same way that they construct the stories they read: by attributing meaning to the emotions evoked in them while reading. In essence, human beings feel compelled to immerse themselves in fiction because this diegetic process helps them to construct their identities as humans.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts (MA)

Level thesis:degree_level

Open Access Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English Language and Literature

Year

2009

Author dc:creator

• Diaz, Gorka

Contributors dc:contributor

• Elisabeth Däumer, PhD
• Charles Cunningham, PhD

• Hemingway
• Ernest
• 1899-1961 Criticism and interpretation
• Narration (Rhetoric)
• Emotions in literature
• Structuralism (Literary analysis)
• Literature in English, North America

Repository record dc:identifier

https://commons.emich.edu/theses/224

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:commons.emich.edu:theses-1223