A Cognitive Poetics Approach To Hemingway’s "Iceberg Worlds"

Cognitive poetics is the application of cognitive science to literary studies. It is concerned with the cognitive structure and cognitive processing of the choice of linguistic forms in discourse. As for literary works, their identification and comprehension involves readers’ various cognitive strategies, therefore, the linguistic forms and stylistics features in literary texts can be fully explained at the cognitive level. As one of the most influential cognitive models in cognitive poetics, Text World Theory mainly concerns the cognitive mechanism of the discourse. In the study of literary discourse, Text World Theory is effective in interpreting readers’ mental representations of the fictional world in their reading process and how literary meanings are generated in readers’ mind as well.Ernest Hemingway is an American writer and journalist. His economical and understated style had a strong influence on20th-century fiction, while his life adventure and his public image influenced later generations. The main feature of his writing style is widely known as Iceberg Style. This writing style permeates in most of his writings, especially in his short novels, which are characterized by dialogues and the omission of the background information. To fully understand their plots and themes, readers have to walk into the protagonists’inner worlds by using the written part to explore the unwritten parts in the fictional worlds, namely, the "iceberg world" underwater. There are plenty of studies on Hemingway at home, but few of them concerns with his writing style from the perspective of cognitive poetics. Based on this observation, this thesis carries on a cognitive poetics study on Hemingway’s iceberg writing style based on Text World Theory and implemented by possible world theory. Established in readers’ cognitive reading process, the paper analyzes Hemingway’s three short novels, Hills like White Elephants, The Killers and Cat in the Rain, mainly through the construction of text world and the conflicts between the characters’ epistemic modal worlds. It attempts to describe the cognitive mechanism of Hemingway’s three short novels, accounting for how readers construct their mental representations in the process of literary reading and providing a cognitive explanation for the colorful text worlds underwater. It argues that Text World Theory acts as a key to open the door of the splendid "iceberg worlds" below the sea of Hemingway’s works. It provides a new perspective for the interpretation of Hemingway’s writings, making readers participate actively into the fictional worlds and the theme, plot and characters’ inner worlds can be better explained. At present, Text World Theory has not been used to study writers’ writing style, so this paper will apply it to the exploration of Hemingway’s writing style, hoping to provide some help for the study of this theory.