A Cognitive Approach to Ernest Hemingway’s Short Fiction

How do readers make sense of Hemingway’s short stories? How is it possible that the camera-like quality of his narrative can appeal to our senses and arouse our emotions? How does it capture us? With reserved narrators and protagonists engaged in laconic dialogs, his texts do not seem to say much. This book consciously revisits our responses to the Hemingway story, a belated response to his invitation to discover what lies beneath the surface of his iceberg. What this pioneering critical endeavor seeks to understand is the thinking required in reading Hemingway’s short fiction. It proposes a cognitively informed model of reading which questions the resources of the reader’s imaginative powers. The cognitive demonstrations here are designed to have potentially larger implications for the short story’s general mode of knowing. Drawing from both cognitively oriented poetics and narratology in equal measure, this book explains what structures our interaction with literary texts.