I found Zunshine's "Why We Read Fiction" extremely interesting. The basis of Zunshine's argument is one that Adam Smith made centuries sago in his "Theory of Moral Sentiments". Essentially, the act of interpretation involves the use of imagination. People interpret how others are feeling by inhabiting their perspective based on the the information they have on them, we imagine ourselves in someone elses shoes and judge their actions according to how we would have acted where we in their position. Zunshine talks a lot about the job of the reader, the way the reader interprets the words on the page, but what about the author? I think that the author does a particularly grueling job while utilizing the "Mind-Reading" in the process of creating a novel. Instead of just the reader's typical imagining of the fictional character, the author must also imagine them self as the reader imagining them self as the character. Thus, there is an extra degree of "Mind Reading" that separates the two there.

I thought this was particularly interesting, especially in the context of interpreting a novel. Take Persuasion for instance. So, when Austen wrote persuasion, she imagined herself as a reader, and again as a reader imagined the reader imagining the characters, and created her novel accordingly. As Readers, however, we end up doing the exact opposite. We imagine the character, understand the context of what is happening in the novel, and then to interpret the meaning of a novel, we re-imagine ourselves as the author, and question the author's motives. After I read Zunshine's article, I thought about this push-and-pull, almost circular relationship that is constantly occurring between the author and the reader in a novel. Essentially, it's like Game Theory, but with a circular process as the reader and author go back and forth. In either case, its a pretty cool process when you think about it, yet we somehow do it so effortlessly.