Decontextualization and Schema Formation in "Hills Like White Elephants" by Ernest Hemingway PDF Download

Author: Amir Hossein Yasini Visti
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3668594376
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 17

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Essay from the year 2014 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, University of Tehran, language: English, abstract: This paper intends to show how the short story "Hills Like White Elephants" by Ernest Hemingway represents the schema formation that takes place through devices of the Critical Discourse Analysis. Closely connected to the idea of "decontextualization", the schema theory is accounted as a part of the "discourse" studies. In fact, it helps reveal how a discourse comes into being, how it controls and is controlled, how it acts and relates to other discourses, and how it disappears. In this paper, this mechanism is delineated in a literary work, as a discourse, by investigating on the confrontation of some CDA’s elements including the situation and the mode of communication, characters’ voices and identity issues. To illuminate, in "Hills Like White Elephants", conversation is served as the mode of communication between the two characters. However, the author’s narration describes the situation – especially the place, of the story to both symbolic function and balancing the mood and the tone of the story. Also, the schema formation is shaped by the voice of the man in the story; it is refreshed when opposed to the girl’s voice. The two voices act as the creator of the two schemata. The other schema duality lies in the two opposite identity forces latent in the identities of the man and the girl. While the man thinks of getting rid of any familial responsibility, the girl’s major concern is her instinctive femininity, creating the opposite schema.

Author: Anonym
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640469364
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 33

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Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Erfurt, course: The American Short Story, language: English, abstract: Can the reader of "Hills like White Elephants" experience the success of the male character, known as "the American", or the triumph of Jig, the female character, at the end of the story? The argument of the American couple waiting at a junction between Barcelona and Madrid represents the centre of Ernest Hemingway's short story. Heming-way published this short story as part of the story collection "Men without Women" in 1927 (ANONYMOUS, 1996). Therefore, it can be assumed that the setting of the story is also conceived for the 1920ies. It is never directly mentioned that both discuss the abortion of their unborn child, although it becomes clear through implications within the text. Whereas the man tries to convince her in a manipulating manner to undergo surgery, she dreams of a future with the child (HEMINGWAY, 1956: 249ff). LAMB even states that: "Much of the conversation is so obscure that on the literal level it can be comprehended only in light of the entire story" (LAMB, 1996: 469). Sev-eral metaphors, images and other literary devices, such as the simile being present in the title and in its several repetitions in the story, add to the reader's perception of the shown conflict. Apparently, the male character represents the dominant part in the relationship and the successful one in the conversation. As the girl states "But I don't care about me. And I'll do it and then everything will be fine" (HEMINGWAY, 1956: 251) after being talked at by her boyfriend, it seems that she gives up and sac-rifices her wishes. However, scholars discuss whether the American or the girl can force their individual points in the end. The aim of this research paper is to examine this question. An analysis of the structure of the short story, the impor-tance of place and positionin

Author: Nina Dietrich
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3638118460
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 20

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Seminar paper from the year 2002 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0 (A), University of Marburg (Institute for Anglistics/ American Studies), course: PS The Initiation Theme in American Fiction, 22 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Initiation in Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms Since it was published in the late 1920s, Ernest Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms has mostly been read as a love story against the background of the First World War (Brooks 81; Matthews 77; Ross 90; Smith 78). This is right insofar as the novel deals with the young American Frederic Henry who, while being involved in the war on the side of the Italian Army, falls in love with a beautiful British nurse, Catherine Barkley. There is, however, more to this book: When looking at the world in which the protagonist finds himself, it becomes clear that it is one in which people are lacking proper, stable values. Everything that Frederic Henry learned in his teenage years, the world he grew up in and its complex value system based on such values as honor and dignity, has fallen apart. Frederic himself expresses this on several occasions, for example in Book Three, when he says, I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. [...] Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the number of roads, the names of rivers, the number of regiments and the dates. (Hemingway 184-5) Because of the meaninglessness of those old values, A Farewell to Arms is also a story dealing with a quest that was typical for Frederic Henry’s generation: a quest for knowledge and a way of living in a world whose foundations have been shaken by the chaos created by World War I. At the beginning of the novel, Frederic Henry is, in many ways, lost: He neither knows where he belongs nor where he is going. He seeks pleasure in activities such as drinking huge quantities of alcohol and going to a whorehouse with his comrades. As it depicts his growth from immaturity to maturity, or, in a way, completion of his character, A Farewell to Arms should be read as his initiation story. [...]

Author: Jella Delzer
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3346504832
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 15

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Seminar paper from the year 2021 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel (Philosophische Fakultät - Englisches Seminar), course: Narrative Theory and the Reading of Literary Texts, language: English, abstract: The purpose of this paper is to show that an analysis and interpretation of the topographical and architectural setting and of the objects within that setting in Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Hills Like White Elephants,” which was published in 1927, provides a fruitful understanding of the short story. This paper investigates how Hemingway transforms topography into metaphors and symbols and how the setting creates the mood and sets the tone of the short story. “Hills Like White Elephants” is a paramount example of Hemingway’s so-called "iceberg theory". Similarly, Hemingway’s short story “Hills Like White Elephants,” which is mostly told in dialogue, is like the tip of an iceberg—the succinct length and the seemingly simple language are deceptive. Analogously to Hemingway’s iceberg theory, there are concealed depths to the surface story. The fact that there are only a few sections in which the setting is described emphasizes that a close reading of the setting is necessary because the lack of description indicates that there is hidden meaning behind the overall setting. This paper argues that Hemingway uses the setting to demonstrate the struggle of the main characters, the American and the girl Jig, about whether to have an abortion—even though words such as ‘abortion’ or ‘pregnancy’ are not mentioned in the text. The paper argues that Hemingway integrates symbolism into the landscape and furthermore uses spatial concepts to convey meaning that goes beyond spatial information. The contrast between abortion or birth correlates with the dichotomy of the setting and is hence almost entirely expressed in spatial terms. Moreover, the descriptions of the setting reflect the couple’s contrasting points of view regarding the pregnancy. The paper aims to discover the implied and hinted meaning within the deceptive simplicity of the text by relying on narrative theory.

Author: Susanne Flohr
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 364052652X
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 31

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Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 1,7, University of Kassel (Literature: Language and Cultural Awareness), course: Department of English & Romance Languages, language: English, abstract: This term paper will take several questions into account by starting off with a general definition of the terms ‘Literature, Language and Cultural Awareness’ as they are the basis for talking about literature and literary texts. Afterwards, a precise definition of the terms will follow before the consequences for the EFL classroom will be mentioned which lead to a text example that shows how one can teach the aspects that have been mentioned before and why it is important to teach students literature at all. The text shows that students need to understand other cultural backgrounds in order to understand the whole text since we do not have the expression ‘hills like white elephants’ in Germany. As a result, this text is a good example for showing how important language and cultural awareness are in order to understand literary texts in the EFL classroom. When we talk about literature in the EFL classroom, we should first of all ask ourselves what we need to take into consideration in general when we want to deal with literary texts in the EFL classroom. Some questions arise like why one should teach literature in the EFL classroom and what kind of literature needs to be taught. It is important to read literary texts in the EFL classroom because the curriculum says that teachers should deal with different countries and cultures by presenting people in real life situations. Therefore, they should mostly use authentic material in order to build a connection to the student’s world. The teacher should be careful in choosing texts for the EFL classroom because the texts need to be suitable for the class in order to let the students work with them.

Author: Thomas Müller
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3638432858
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 10

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Essay from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, University of Tubingen (Seminar für Englische Philologie), course: Proseminar, language: English, abstract: Hemingway once said: “If it is any use to know it, I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There are seven-eights of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.” Hemingway tended to not tell the reader about how the characters in his stories feel or think. He lets the reader develop his own ideas about the background or intentions of the characters. This Essay will show and compare the use of this theory in two of Hemingway’s short stories, “Hills Like White Elephants” and “The Killers”.

Author: Stefanie Brunn
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3638816966
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 30

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Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: B+, Humboldt-University of Berlin, language: English, abstract: Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway are two very influential American writers. Both have contributed a lot to the development of the short story, especially to its sub-genre, story of initiation, with various of their works. In this essay, I want to analyse some of their most famous stories in order to highlight some important initiatory aspects. Firstly, it is interesting to take a further look at the origins of the initiation term, in order to understand why it is applied to literary theorie. Then I will elaborate some important elements and common features to define the initiation story as a literary genre. In the following, to illustrate the theory, I will look at the way Sherwood Anderson built up his stories of initiation. To get a further idea of Anderson's texts and ideologies, I will shortly explain the Freudian influence on his texts and his opinion about American industrialisation. With those information in mind, one can easier understand, how he elaborates his theory of the grotesques, the characters of his work Winesburg, Ohio. In order to understand how this collection of short stories is contently held together, it is essential to have a look at George Willard, the protagonist, and his development and initiation. In the following chapter I will make plain, that the initiation theme is also a very important aspect in a lot of other short stories of Anderson, as for example in „I want to know why“, where a boy painfully has to encounter a form of sexual initiation. To be able to identify also other styles of creating initiation stories, I will focus on Hemingway's Nick Adams stories, on the first one, „Indian camp“, where young Nick is forcefully initiated to birth and death, and on the last one, „Fathers and sons“, where Nick as a father himself reflects on his past and his father. Finally, I will make a short comparison between both authors in order to be able to draw a conclusion in the end.

Author: Matthias Storm
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 363823312X
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 23

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Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 2,3 (B), University of Freiburg (English Seminar), course: Introduction to English and American Literature Studies, language: English, abstract: Stories are the oldest forms of literature. They found their first expression in the classical tales of the Old Testament. In recent times stories have taken a broader form than during the 18th and 19th century, when the literary form of the novel and poetry prevailed. The 20th century has discovered new possibilities and in connection with it: a new interpretation of human character. This essay deals with theme and structure of Ernest Hemingway’ s “The Undefeated”. In particular it describes the story and the main theme. Furthermore it gives a characterisation of Manuel Garcia, illustrates the pecularities of Hemingway’ s style and introduces the bullfight as subject matter. It deals with “The Undefeated“ as a model for Hemingway’ s “The Old Man and the Sea“. The ideas of this essay are thematically linked. The second chapter looks at general aspects. It is an introduction into the biography of Ernest Hemingway and retells the story of “The Undefeated”. In the main part (third chapter) the themes mentioned above are examined. Results are drawn in the fourth chapter. After that in the appendix references are given.

Author: Douglas Mao
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108487068
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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The first book specifically devoted to the history and prospects of the new modernist studies.

Author: Erick Verran
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1685710026
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
Stitched together over five years of journaling, Obiter Dicta is a commonplace book of freewheeling explorations representing the transcription of a dozen notebooks, since painstakingly reimagined for publication. Organized after Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia, this unschooled exercise in aesthetic thought--gleefully dilettantish, oftentimes dangerously close to the epigrammatic--interrogates an array of subject matter (although inescapably circling back to the curiously resemblant histories of Western visual art and instrumental music) through the lens of drive-by speculation. Erick Verran's approach to philosophical inquiry follows the brute-force literary technique of Jacques Derrida to exhaustively favor the material grammar of a signifier over hand-me-down meaning, juxtaposing outer semblances with their buried systems and our etched-in-stone intuitions about color and illusion, shape and value, with lessons stolen from seemingly unrelatable disciplines. Interlarded with extracts of Ludwig Wittgenstein but also Wallace Stevens, Cormac McCarthy as well as Roland Barthes, this cache of incidental remarks eschews what's granular for the biggest picture available, leaving below the hyper-specialized fields of academia for a bird's-eye view of their crop circles. Obiter Dicta is an unapologetic experiment in intellectual dot-connecting that challenges much long-standing wisdom about everything from illuminated manuscripts to Minecraft and the evolution of European music with lyrical brevity; that is, before jumping to the next topic.