Work · Phenomenology & Hermeneutics
The Literary Work of Art
The literary work consists of four layers – sounds, meanings, represented objects and schematised aspects – and contains places of indeterminacy that reading concretises.
Introduction
Ingarden wrote the book in German and published it in 1931 with Niemeyer in Halle. His aim was ontological as much as literary: by showing that a literary work is a purely intentional object, dependent on acts of consciousness yet not identical with any of them, he wanted to sharpen the contrast with real objects and so prepare his critique of Husserl’s idealism. The work, he argues, has four strata – word sounds, units of meaning, represented objects and schematised aspects –. Because it can never determine everything, it contains places of indeterminacy, which each reading fills in a concretisation. The book shaped literary theory in Poland and, through Wolfgang Iser and Hans Robert Jauss, reception aesthetics in Germany; an English translation appeared in 1973.
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