Style Brings in Mental States!

I Much of what I write these days is an elaboration of Alan Palmer’s argument that “novel reading is mind-reading.” Here, too, I take up one aspect of that argument and consider it in light of my recent experience of studying fiction in a lab with fMRI equipment. (Well, not really—we are actually very far from approaching actual works of literature with brain imaging technology—but as close as I have come to doing so.) As Palmer observes in his target essay for this volume, to claim that we understand the actions of fictional characters by uncovering “the mental network” behind them, is not to