A Cognitive Approach to Ernest Hemingway’s Short Fiction A Cognitive Approach to Ernest Hemingway’s Short Fiction By Gabriela Tucan A Cognitive Approach to Ernest Hemingway's Short Fiction By Gabriela Tucan This book first published 2021 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2021 by Gabriela Tucan All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-6762-1 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-6762-7 In loving memory of my mother. “In the study of the mind, whatever looks natural is most suspect” (The Literary Mind, Mark Turner) TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements .................................................................................... x Introduction ................................................................................................ 1 Chapter One .............................................................................................. 16 Cognitive Sciences Come Together 1.1 Mind, body, and cognition ............................................................ 16 1.2 The turn to embodied cognition .................................................... 29 1.3 Windows to the mind: the theory of conceptual blending ............. 33 1.4 Mappings in thought and language: the theory of mental space ... 40 1.5 Contexts, constructions, and inferences: frame semantics ............ 45 1.6 Mapping the mind: domains and the theory of domains ............... 48 1.7 Space, movement, embodiment: the meanings of the body .......... 49 1.8 Metaphorical thinking: its conceptual force and further implications ................................................................................... 53 1.9 Metonymic thought: a cognitive approach .................................... 59 Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 63 What the Mind has to do with Literary Texts. Cognitively Oriented Literary Studies 2.1 General overview .......................................................................... 63 2.2 Reading in the cognitive age ......................................................... 69 2.3 Cognitive poetics as the new interdisciplinary venture ................. 76 2.4 A cognitive inquiry into narrative: toward a cognitive narratology .................................................................................... 80 2.5 Cognitive poetics and cognitive narratology: gains and gaps ....... 90 Chapter Three ........................................................................................... 94 Ernest Hemingway’s Short Stories: Cognitive Features and the Reader’s Mind 3.1 On defining short storyness........................................................... 94 3.2 The autonomy of short fiction: intrinsic nature and distinctive features ........................................................................................ 100 3.3 Short stories: creative tools for thinking ..................................... 107 viii Table of Contents 3.4 Short stories and counterfactual thinking: an introduction ......... 109 3.5 Practical argument: Hemingway’s style and artistic technique ... 112 3.6 Ernest Hemingway: exercises of artistic style ............................. 115 3.7 The definition and nature of the Hemingway short story: a close-up .................................................................................... 119 Chapter Four ........................................................................................... 125 Narrative Space, Possible Worlds and Counterfactuality in Ernest Hemingway’s Short Stories 4.1 Image-schematic knowledge and immersive features of short stories .......................................................................................... 125 4.2 Time as a forking path. Metaphorical spatializations of time ..... 141 4.2.1 Fathers and Sons ................................................................ 150 4.2.2 A Canary for One ............................................................... 154 4.2.3 Hills like White Elephants .................................................. 156 4.2.4 The End of Something......................................................... 159 4.3 The theory of possible worlds. Private embedded narratives ...... 163 4.4 Living in the best possible world: The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio, Now I Lay Me, and A Way You’ll Never Be ........ 167 4.5 Self-construal and identity. Preliminary concluding remarks ..... 175 4.6 The world as it might have been: counterfactuals in Wine of Wyoming, The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife, and The Three- Day Blow ..................................................................................... 177 Chapter Five ........................................................................................... 192 Fictional Minds, Mental Spaces, and their Couterfactual Capacities 5.1 Hemingway reconsidered ............................................................ 192 5.2. Emergence of fictional minds .................................................... 197 5.3 Fictional thought in behavioral and transitional narratives: The Killers, Out of Season, and Up in Michigan ......................... 203 5.3.1 The Killers .......................................................................... 203 5.3.2 Out of Season ..................................................................... 208 5.3.3 Up in Michigan ................................................................... 216 5.4 Blending and the study of narrative ............................................ 222 5.5. Double-scope identity blends: blending and de-blending the counterfactual self. Big Two-Hearted River, The Sea Change, Cat in the Rain, and Soldier’s Home .................................................. 230 5.5.1 Big Two-Hearted River ...................................................... 234 5.5.2 The Sea Change .................................................................. 237 5.5.3 Cat in the Rain .................................................................... 241 5.5.4 Soldier’s Home ................................................................... 245 A Cognitive Approach to Ernest Hemingway’s Short Fiction ix 5.6 Compression of vital relations: A Very Short Story .................... 251 Conclusions ............................................................................................ 256 Bibliography ........................................................................................... 268 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Over the past several years, I have taught a course in communication strategies in short fiction and another in twentieth-century American literature at the West University of Timișoara, Romania. I have been extremely fortunate in the intelligence and acute sense of observation that my students have brought to these classes. I wish to thank them for their countless observations, lively critical comments, and enthusiasm that have contributed to the development of my research trajectory and helped me to formulate the ideas of this book. A debt of gratitude is owed to my friends and colleagues at the West University, in particular the literature specialists Cristina Chevereșan and Ana Cristina Băniceru, who were generous and especially supportive in their remarks when the book was in its thesis phase. Special thanks go to my friend Diana Nacu, who read a late version of the manuscript and gave brilliant suggestions that immensely improved my work. I can only express my gratitude to professor Mircea Mihăieș for his encouragement and support through the years. My further research was aided by the postdoctoral school of the West University that generously funded a month of research in Venice, Italy, at Ca’ Foscari University. The libraries there were an invaluable resource for this study. This book has also benefited immeasurably from the debates at conferences in the arts and the humanities in Mainz, Baltimore, Venice, Budapest, and elsewhere. I am also indebted to the proofreader of the book, Alex Monaghan, for his helpful comments and the editor, Adam Rummens, for his great attention to this work. Finally, I owe my engagement with cognitive science and short fiction to my husband, Dumitru, who began reading in the field to show his tireless support of this project. I thank him for his intellectual comradeship and especially for his trust and great patience in assisting me with the publication of the manuscript. INTRODUCTION It is something of a commonplace today that natural scientists are only able to judge their work in isolation while humanities research is intended to be understood only by specialists working in their respective academic fields. It is a matter of some debate whether work by practitioners in differing disciplinary areas is expected to remain invisible and intellectually uninteresting for their counterparts. In place of this traditionally sharp division between humanities and natural sciences, the past decades have seen a growing interest in the enriching cross-fertilization between scientific approaches and humanistic investigations. This scientific turn in the study of literature outlines a new paradigm founded on rigorous and reliable knowledge,