Before diving into the PDF’s contents, it is vital to understand the author. Roman Ingarden (1893–1970) was a Polish philosopher and a direct student of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. However, Ingarden was no disciple; he famously broke with Husserl over the concept of idealism (the idea that reality is purely consciousness-dependent).
Ingarden argued for a realist phenomenology: objects exist independently of our perception, but our consciousness constitutes their meaning and aesthetic qualities. This schism is crucial for The Literary Work of Art. Unlike later post-structuralists who argued that a text has no stable structure (Derrida), or formalists who ignored the reader (Shklovsky), Ingarden carved a middle path.
He asked: What is the mode of being of a literary work? Is it the physical book? The author’s intention? The reader’s experience? His answer changed literary theory forever.
| Your Goal | Focus On | |-----------|-----------| | Intro to phenomenology of literature | Chapter 1 (“Introduction”) + §13 (“The Literary Work and Its Strata”) | | Understanding “places of indeterminacy” | §34–§38 | | Comparing Ingarden to Iser or Fish | §44 (“Concretizations”) | | Writing a paper on literary ontology | §60–§66 (“The Metaphysical Qualities”) |
Long before Wolfgang Iser or Stanley Fish, Ingarden argued that the reader actively co-creates the aesthetic object. Iser explicitly borrowed the concept of Leerstellen (gaps) from Ingarden.
Ingarden was not a formalist. He argues that great literature reveals metaphysical qualities – the what it’s like of existence. Examples include: the sublime, the tragic, the grotesque, the eerie, the holy. These qualities are not concepts or emotions but atmospheres that emerge when the four strata interact properly.
Metaphysical qualities are not stated; they are shown through the concretization process. A detective story without the quality of “the menacing” falls flat. A tragedy without “the tragic” is merely sad. Ingarden insists that the presence of such qualities is what distinguishes a mere literary text (e.g., a telephone directory) from a literary work of art.
Search "The Literary Work of Art" Ingarden filetype:pdf. Some university websites host pre-print chapters or open-access articles that summarize and include large quoted sections. You may not get the whole book, but you will get critical portions.
Searching for “Roman Ingarden the literary work of art pdf” is not just a historical curiosity. His ideas are alive in current debates:
Perhaps Ingarden’s most innovative contribution. This layer refers to the perspective-bound ways in which objects appear. A tree in a novel might be seen “from a distance” or “in the mist.” These aspects are not the tree itself, but the modes of givenness. They are “schematized” because the text provides only a skeleton; the reader must flesh it out.
When you read, you unconsciously fill in those gaps. You decide (or the text guides you) that Anna’s eyes are “deep” and “dark,” but you may imagine them as brown, gray, or green. This act of filling-in is what Ingarden calls concretization.
Crucially:
Thus, two readers reading the same Hamlet are encountering the same schematic work but creating different aesthetic objects. Ingarden solves the problem of literary identity: the work is one (the invariant structure), but its concretizations are many.