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Abstract
Abstract：American cognitive narratologist Lisa Zunshine brings three-level nested mental states, typified as “I know that you know that I know”, into literary criticism and has been widely noticed by scholars. Applying nested mental states as a perspective, she discusses its historicity and genre issues, and how it participates in ideological discourse and characterization. This paper delineates Zunshine’s research ideas and inherent logic, and at the same time tries to point out some of its confusions. Multiple embedding of mental states in narrative texts has different origins, and can be classified into narrator’s and character’s multiple embedded mental states according to the cognitive agent. It is therefore too absolute for Zunshine to classify all novels into one category and to contend that three-level nested mental states is a baseline in most fictions after Austen. More importantly, the pattern of nested mental states is closely related to generic conventions. Therefore, we should not presuppose that all fictional texts have similar patterns of nested mental states, but should connect them to the themes in novels after carefully considering generic conventions.
Key words: cognitive narratology; multiple nested mental states; genre
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