论詹赛恩的《我们为什么阅读虚构作品》

Review of Why We Read Fiction by Zunshine

美国认知文学批评家詹赛恩在《我们为什么阅读虚构作品》中指出，心灵阅读是人的基本生存技能，小说能够训练并挑战这种技能，所以受到人们喜欢；小说可以把多层次的意向性嵌入作品，制造出意向性的迷宫，丰富作品的内涵；小说也可以通过控制表象后面的元表象，使信息的源头出现错乱，考验读者的元表象能力；普通不可靠叙事往往鼓励读者相信叙述者，但读者后来又出乎意料地发现有些地方并不正确，侦探小说从一开头就提倡怀疑叙述，属于典型的元表象游戏。

According to Why We Read Fiction by American cognitive literary critic Lisa Zunshine, fiction engages, teases, and pushes to its tentative limits our mind-reading capacity, which is essential to adaptation; multiple levels of embedded intentionality can be found in some novels, which form a labyrinth of meanings; readers may be challenged by the controlled metarepresentation, which shows the source of the information, and readers are often encouraged by unreliable narrators to believe the story, only to be surprised later, but they are reminded by the narrators not to believe from the beginning of the detective novel, which is a game of metarepresentation.