Abstract

This paper offers a deconstructive analysis of the work of Mitra Gholamain and Keith Oatley. The authors’ treatment of fiction as a simulation of psychic reality can be inverted; psychic reality is already constituted by non-literal narrative elements. I offer empirical considerations drawn from current psychological literature. The relationship between readers’ psychology and works of narrativefiction is a constitutive structural similarity, rather than simply a psychological process of simulation.