Roman Ingarden The Literary Work Of Art Pdf Best ✮ ❲Updated❳
The reader must actively actualize these aspects, turning a passive description into a vivid mental picture. 4. The Stratum of Represented Objects
Ingarden rejected both extremes. He posited that the literary work is an . It does not possess physical reality like a stone, nor is it purely ideal like a mathematical triangle. Instead, it is a heteronomous entity —it derives its existence from the intentional acts of consciousness of the author who created it and the reader who reconstructs it. The Four Heterogeneous Layers of Literature
Because text is limited, no author can describe a character perfectly. If a novel says "John walked into the room," the book rarely specifies John's exact eye color, his heart rate, or how many buttons are on his shirt. These missing pieces are spots of indeterminacy. roman ingarden the literary work of art pdf
The reader is essential for completing the work (concretization).
| Stratum | What it contains | Example | |---------|----------------|---------| | | Phonemes, rhythm, tone, melody of language | The alliteration in “The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew” | | 2. Meaning units (sentences and larger units) | Word meanings, sentence meanings, plot‑level sense | “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” – second clause modifies the first | | 3. Represented objects (states of affairs, characters, events) | The fictional world: people, actions, settings | Hamlet, Elsinore, the ghost | | 4. Schematized aspects (the perspectival showing of objects) | The way objects are presented from a particular point of view (not fully given) | The castle described only as seen through fog, or heard from inside | The reader must actively actualize these aspects, turning
A specially provocative part of Ingarden’s argument concerns the role of the reader. He refuses both the sovereignty of the text-as-fixed-object and the extreme subjectivism that casts the reader as the author of meaning. For Ingarden, the literary work is an intentional object: it is constituted in acts of consciousness that intend its strata. The author produces a text which manifests certain determinable structures, but the full realization of the work—its aesthetic completion—requires the reader’s imaginative activity. In reading, we construct or “complete” aspects of the represented world, project perspectives, and enact aspectual shapes. The work thereby occupies a liminal ontological status: it is neither wholly immanent in the physical inscription nor wholly projected by the reader’s fancy. It is an object of intentionality with a stable, norm-governed structure demanding certain interpretive tasks.
The Architecture of Fiction: Understanding Roman Ingarden’s The Literary Work of Art He posited that the literary work is an
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Ingarden, Roman. The Literary Work of Art: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic, and Theory of Literature . Translated by George G. Grabowicz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973.