Quote:
Originally Posted by TGS
I've just handed my MA thesis in, which is mostly about a dead Polish philosopher called Roman Ingarden who, amongst other things, wrote about the ontology and epistemology of literary art. According to Ingarden a literary work can be thought of as consisting of four strata - the stratum of word sounds, the stratum of meaning units, the stratum of represented objectivities and the stratum of schematized aspects. These all come together in the process of concretization carried out by the reader. The interesting part is how our cognitive equipment puts together the story world from these bits - particularly the schematized aspects. Any novel will contain gaps - spots of indeterminacy - that the reader fills-in to make a representation of the portrayed world. Part of the skill of writing is the disposition of these gaps in such a way that they both prompt for particular fillings in but leave some imaginative work to the reader.
It's interesting to read responses on this thread about how people consciously experience reading, (of course, personal "internal" reflection might or might not be a good guide to what is actually going on), and it seems most of what we are aware of is happening at the level of constructing imaginative objects, without really being aware of the contribution of Ingarden's "lower" strata.
|
Yeesh. I just had a flashback of a semester spent studying Noam Chomsky's linguistic theories.