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

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.