Roman Ingarden's theory of reader experience: A critical assessment

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.