Author

Gorka Diaz

Date Approved

2009

Degree Type

Open Access Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department or School

English Language and Literature

Committee Member

Elisabeth Däumer, PhD

Committee Member

Charles Cunningham, PhD

Abstract

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.

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.

Share

COinS