情感策略、情绪模式和共情结局——塞尔克故事和文学批评之旅

Affective Strategies,Emotion Schemas,and Empathic Endings:Selkie Girls and a Critical Theory

苏格兰“塞尔克”(selkie)故事是一种常见的国际性的民间故事类型,有许多改编版,也引发了相关研究。近年来进入儿童文学研究领域的认知研究能对此提供一个新的研究视角,对五个叙述的事件中所隐含的性别意识形态作进一步阐释,这一意识形态构成了原版故事及其重述的内在基础。情感是这一过程的核心,因为它引导我们对作品的理解,其途径为:允许文本和读者自我意识之间的互动,支持文本元素的跨领域分类以及在早期阅读过程中预先构建读者对文本含义的理解。此类故事的核心情感问题是,里面所有的角色都不可能有一个幸福的结局。本研究聚焦于故事结尾内在的引起共鸣的情感,认为读者对所描述的人物和情境的共情是由常见的情感模式所形成的,即跨越时间和文本,对不同情境和人物的各种情感反应。

The selkie stories have formed a popular type of fairytales and had a lot of adaptation which aroused some research interest. This paper argues that the recent entrance of cognitive studies into children’s literature research enables a new perspective that can transform earlier research without discarding it – in this case, by enhancing an exposition of the gender ideology implied in five narrative events which structure the tale and its retellings. Affect is central to this procedure, because it guides comprehension by allowing engagement between text and reader self-concept, by enabling cross-domain categorisation of text elements, and by pre-structuring a reader’s understanding of the meaning of a text early in the reading process (Miall 1989). The core affective issue is that a happy outcome is not possible for all of the characters in the story. Focusing on empathic emotions inherent in the narrative close, the article argues that reader empathy with depicted characters and situations is shaped by familiar emotion schemas, that is, kinds of emotional response to situations and people that persist over time and across contexts.