Browsing by Subject "Ohio"

The written word in fiction does not only reflect reality but communicates in a complex way. In fact, literary language achieves its greatest potential when communicating through both that which is written and that which is implied. Literary language evokes and makes evident through devices like irony or metaphor, etc. It is a discourse that can communicate a message which escapes the boundaries of language, since it can rely on the unsaid to communicate the reality it constructs to readers. Thus, my focus in this thesis is the way readers comprehend the unsaid information of the literary text when reconstructing the experience of characters in fiction. My primary material is Sherwood Anderson’s short story cycle Winesburg, Ohio (1919), where the communal experience of the people in this fictitious town is presented as fragments of truth, and the impossibility for characters to express themselves in the town’s conventional speech turns them into “grotesques.” Because of the grip conventionality has over the common people in an early twentieth century American town, I start my analysis by an aesthetic approach analyzing the novel’s language and its relation to essence. Then, in order to study the ways in which the literary language makes use of the unsaid to communicate the fictional experience to readers, I make use of cognitive studies, focusing on how enacting the embodied experience, reading the mind of the characters, and empathizing with them affect the way readers reconstruct the unsaid information. My thesis shows how the absent information in literary discourse can make itself evident to readers, and that it is possible to identify textual evidence that helps readers reconstruct the fictional experience through interpreting the unsaid.