"Because I think deeper": Ernest Hemingway and the burden of consciousness.
Item
-
Title
-
"Because I think deeper": Ernest Hemingway and the burden of consciousness.
-
Identifier
-
AAI3288880
-
identifier
-
3288880
-
Creator
-
Cirino, Mark.
-
Contributor
-
Adviser: Marc Dolan
-
Date
-
2007
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Literature, American
-
Abstract
-
My project examines the role of consciousness in the works of Ernest Hemingway. Although Hemingway has been excluded from studies of consciousness and cognition in fiction, my study argues that Hemingway's sensitivity to the interiority and mental state of his characters is undervalued. By examining canonical psychological novelists, psychologists, philosophers, and cutting edge studies in the philosophy of mind, my dissertation demonstrates the centrality of Hemingway's characters' consciousness to a proper interpretation of his fiction. Although critics have been distracted by the sensational elements on the surface of Hemingway's work, the tension in Hemingway's fiction rests in the subtle interplay between the inevitability of thought and the external exigencies of the situation that the character faces. A Hemingway protagonist is generally in either a psychological crisis that hinders action, a physical crisis that impairs rational thought, or both. We see the man of thought in action, and the man of action in thought. Topics in consciousness such as the perception of time, habit, perception, memory, the self, imagination, and the stream of consciousness all are central components in the drama of Hemingway's fiction.;My study treats Hemingway as a surreptitious psychological novelist, as invested in consciousness as his predecessors and contemporaries who are more readily categorized as "psychological novelists." This dissertation demonstrates that a proper interpretation of Hemingway's fiction depends on a thorough understanding of topics in consciousness, in philosophical, psychological, and scientific terms. Through close readings of representative texts, a new portrait of Hemingway emerges, a figure that represents an innovative slant on the notion of a psychological novel. With William James, Henri Bergson, and Freud as its foundation, but supplementing their work with contemporary studies, this project devotes chapters to major Hemingway works ("Big Two-Hearted River" and For Whom the Bell Tolls), as well as those long dismissed as simplistic (The Old Man and the Sea) or inept (Islands in the Stream).
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
