Roman Ingarden's theory of reader experience: A critical assessment
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Peer F. Bundgaard
Peer F. Bundgaard (b. 1967) is an associate professor at aarhus University 〈sempb@hum.au.dk〉. His research interests include aesthetic semiotics and the crossovers between cognitive linguistics and phenomenology of language. His publications include “Towards a cognitive semiotics of the visual artwork” (2009); “Husserl and language” (2010); and “The grammar of aesthetic intuition – on Ernst Cassirer's concept of symbolic forms in the visual arts” (2011).
Abstract
Roman Ingarden (1973a, 1973b) developed an ontology of the literary artwork with implications for a theory of reader experience. An upshot of the fact that narratives represent only incompletely determined states of affairs, endowed with “spots of indeterminacy,” is that readers fill out the blanks left by the author. Filling-out is therefore considered a quasi perceptual act leading to the constitution of a full object in the reader's experience. In this paper, I challenge the degree to which readers' concretization of texts depends on such completing acts. I point to the fact that perception itself is schematic, and that the analogy to perception would rather imply that concretization does not imply full filling-out. On the contrary, there seems to be a correspondence between the standard level of descriptive granularity in literature and the schematic coarse-grainedness of perception. To corroborate this claim, I show how deviations from that descriptive baseline produce a variety of meaning effects.
About the author
Peer F. Bundgaard (b. 1967) is an associate professor at aarhus University 〈sempb@hum.au.dk〉. His research interests include aesthetic semiotics and the crossovers between cognitive linguistics and phenomenology of language. His publications include “Towards a cognitive semiotics of the visual artwork” (2009); “Husserl and language” (2010); and “The grammar of aesthetic intuition – on Ernst Cassirer's concept of symbolic forms in the visual arts” (2011).
©[2013] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Introduction
- Approaching the abstract: Building blocks for an epistemology of abstract objects
- The ideal as real and as purely intentional: Ingarden-based reflections
- Making sense together: A dynamical account of linguistic meaning-making
- An example of the “synthetic a priori”: On how it helps us to widen our philosophical horizons
- The generality of signs: The actual relevance of anti-psychologism
- Sensory imagination and narrative perspective: Explaining perceptual focalization
- The basic distinctions in Der Streit
- The Wolf: Ingarden to the narratological rescue. A few remarks on a messy situation within the theory of fiction
- Roman Ingarden's theory of reader experience: A critical assessment
- Varieties of intentional objects
- More than an attitude: Roman Ingarden's aesthetics
Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Introduction
- Approaching the abstract: Building blocks for an epistemology of abstract objects
- The ideal as real and as purely intentional: Ingarden-based reflections
- Making sense together: A dynamical account of linguistic meaning-making
- An example of the “synthetic a priori”: On how it helps us to widen our philosophical horizons
- The generality of signs: The actual relevance of anti-psychologism
- Sensory imagination and narrative perspective: Explaining perceptual focalization
- The basic distinctions in Der Streit
- The Wolf: Ingarden to the narratological rescue. A few remarks on a messy situation within the theory of fiction
- Roman Ingarden's theory of reader experience: A critical assessment
- Varieties of intentional objects
- More than an attitude: Roman Ingarden's aesthetics
