Das Literarische Kunstwerk Research Articles

Twardowski, Ingarden, and Blaustein on Creative Imagination

The article is a critical elaboration of two phenomenological theories of imagination formulated by Ingarden and Blaustein in their discussion with Twardowski. Ingarden, as well as Blaustein were students of both Twardowski and Husserl, however, they defined imagination in two different contexts: whereas for Ingarden a proper way of analysis of imagination is ontology, for Blaustein imagination is the object of descriptive psychology, connected mainly with an aesthetic experience. As a result, the question of creativity of imagination is described in two different, but intertwined ways. For Ingarden, creative imagination is understood as a noematical structure which generates the imagined object as a purely intentional object. Ingarden’s description expresses the ontological status of the imagined object as ontologically dependent on the act of imagining, and on the content of the imagined object. In his review of Ingarden’s Das literarische Kunstwerk, Blaustein was clear that one has to revise Ingarden’s theory of purely intentional object by adopting it to imaginative intentionality and aesthetic experience. To elaborate Ingarden’s theory of imagination, Blaustein discusses it also with reference to Twardowski. Blaustein claims that Twardowski’s Cartesian differentiation between perceptive, reproductive, and creative imagination is based on a vague criterion, and moreover it does not refer to two key notions of descriptive psychology, i.e., the notion of the representative content, and the intentional object. As a result of his critique, Blaustein limits the concept of creative imagination to ‘fantasy’, understood as secondary imagination.

“The Tragedy of Verbal Metaphysics” by Leon Chwistek

This is the first English translation of Leon Chwistek’s “Tragedia werbalnej metafizyki (Z powodu książki Dra Ingardena: Das literarische Kunstwerk),” Kwartalnik Filozoficzny, Vol. X, 1932, 46–76. Chwistek offers a scathing critique of Roman Ingarden’s Das literarische Kunstwerk (translated into English as The Literary Work of Art) and of the entire Phenomenology movement. The text also contains many hints at Chwistek’s own philosophical and formal ideas. The book that Chwistek reviews attracted wide attention and was instrumental in winning Ingarden a position as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Lwów in 1933. Chwistek’s alienation from his fellow logicians of the Lvov-Warsaw school is clear from his ridicule of Leśniewski’s project.

Unseen Paintings and Unheard Melodies: The Uses and Limits of Interart Studies

Interart or intermedial research has become a widely accepted branch of Comparative Literature. The temptation to cover two or three different arts is great, although the dangers of this are also undeniable. A literary scholar, even if he or she is accomplished, is not necessarily qualified to comment on music, painting or film. The adjective ‘musical’ is often used in a figurative, metaphoric, or simply vague sense by both creative authors and literary scholars. One of Celan’s early poems is entitled ‘Todesfuge’ (‘Death Fugue’) (1944–45), and Aldous Huxley’s semiautobiographical character Philip Quarles writes about ‘contrapuntal plots’ in his notebook.1 In Das literarische Kunstwerk (The Literary Work of Art) Roman Ingarden applied the term ‘polyphony’ in his discussion of the stratum of meaning, and the title of Chapter One of Mikhail Bakhtin’s Problemy poetiki Doetoevsogo (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics) is ‘Dostoevsky’s Polyphonic Novel and Its Treatment in Critical Literature’. In my view, all these metaphorical references to music may be somewhat misleading if we remember the precise meanings of the musical terms, for instance that ‘polyphony’ implies the simultaneity of independent lines of melody. In Chapter Five ofHowards End, the characters discuss the possibility of interart comparisons. Margaret Schlegel disagrees with her sister:

Roman Ingarden’s theory of intentional musical work

Roman Ingarden (1893-1970) is a representative of the phenomenological trend in philosophy. He pursued his ontological interests in his fundamental treatise Das literarische Kunstwerk that was the starting point for his studies of other areas of art including music. For Ingarden, direct musical experience is a starting point for philosophical reflection, which should be free from any theoretical prejudice. He considers the essence of the musical work in such dimensions as ontological, the work?s structure, its perception and axiology (aesthetics). Ingarden formulates a thesis about a single layer of the musical work, an aspect which distinguishes music from other works of art. A musical work is for him a purely intentional object whose origins spring from creative acts of composers and whose ontological basis rests directly in the score.

Ingarden and the Prague school

Commentators have pointed out a number of noteworthy connections between Prague School Structuralism and the phenomenological tradition. Examining Roman Ingarden's Das literarische Kunstwerk – first published in German in 1931 – vis-a-vis the theories of the Prague School yields additional insight into the phenomenological contexts of Czech Structuralism. Yet the importance of Ingarden's aesthetics for literary bohemistics is not merely historical. Above and beyond the obvious influence of Ingarden on Prague theorists like Felix Vodicka, Ingarden's stratification of the literary text into four levels or modalities of signification, and his emphasis on the world-creating properties of fictional discourse, reveal the possibilities and limits of both the Structuralist and the phenomenological orientations. Indeed, viewed in tandem with the polyfunctionalist theories of the Prague School, Ingarden's aesthetic theory shows how we might work toward a richer, more productive approach to verbal art generally – an approach that draws on phenomenological and functionalist ideas, but that also recasts those ideas in light of more recent developments in linguistic and literary theory, especially developments associated with linguistic pragmatics and possible worlds semantics.

Chance and the Text of Experience: Freud, Nietzsche, and Shakespeare's Hamlet (review)

136Philosophy and Literature is how to persuade that Ingarden and some others are right. Ifthe accumulated experiences of ages are anything to go by, humanity will go on alternately enjoying art in its own perverse ways, or destroying it when its mood changes— caring not a bit for the broad Ingardenian theses, never mind their subdeties and distinctions. The present selection consists ofeight papers and a monumentalbibliography of works by and on Ingarden, which takes up over a quarter of the book. McCormick endeavors to convince us that he has put together a balanced representation ofIngarden's crucial works, but he has simply gathered scattered papers that have become available in translation since 1961. In addition to the one already cited, these include: "On Philosophical Aesthetics," "Phenomenological Aesthetics: An Attemptat Defining Its Range," "A Marginal Commentary on Aristotie's Poetics," "Psychologism and Psychology in Literary Scholarship," "Artistic and Aesthetic Value," "Aesthetic Experience and Aesthetic Object," and "The Physicalistic Theory of Language and the Work of Literature." Nor has McCormick paid much attention to the detail of editorial responsibilities . The paper on psychologism is preceded by the translator's (John Fizer's) useful introduction, but such material should either have been incorporated into the editor's general introduction or each paper given a similar separate introduction for consistency's sake. Moreover, in this book obviously aimed at readers with no German, Fizer is allowed to quote in German some crucial sentences from Ingarden's The Literary Work of Art, which he refers to as Das Literarische Kunstwerk and claims, against McCormick's testimony to the contrary, that it is not yet available in English. Ingarden's own texts have not been checked for similar inconsistencies and Husserl's work is sometimes referred to as Logische Untersuchungen, sometimes as Logical Investigations. The dust jacket correcdy informs that Ingarden died in 1970, but Fizer is allowed to say he died a year earlier, while the Congress Catalog rubric gives his date of birth as 1983 and implies, perhaps not surprisingly, that he is still alive. Curiously, the book is published in a series devoted to "Austrian intellectual history." LondonAdam Czerniawski Chance and the Text of Experience: Freud, Nietzsche, and Shakespeare's Hamlet, by William Beatty Warner; 308 pp. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986, $29.95. Iffinding the rightjacket photo is a matter ofchance, this author was certainly Reviews137 lucky. The cover shows Nietzsche and Paul Rèe drawing a small cart; in the driver's seat, holding a whip and smiling like the Mona Lisa, is Lou Salomé. Chance brought them together, chance provided the props and, if one were writing about those photographed, the intersection of their chances with one's own would be a chance too good to miss—a chance that would not only compel interpretation but would also offer the writer some purchase, some mastery over the labyrinths of those texts, those lives. Warner's book explores what is at stake for the subject who accommodates the threats and opportunities chance brings its way. At the same time, Warner also offers a program for biographical criticism. By studying the archive of a life and thought in the making, he aims to recuperate the role chance plays in the production of texts. This archive or "life-writing" is often directed to or against another person in a dialogue that is only pardy under conscious control and, for Freud in the 1890s, that other was Wilhelm Fliess. Warner's account of the role chance plays in Freud's life and thought in the 1890s begins with an explication of the interplay between memory and fantasy in psychic life and moves on to a detailed reading of Freud's "non-vixit" dream. Where Freud relates the dream to a single primal scene of rivalry, Warner's analysis is more concerned with the mechanisms that allow Freud to settle on such a singular reading. Other scenes compete with the one Freud privileges, but Freud feels interpellated by a linguistic coincidence and his response to this chance guides his interpretation in a self-serving way. It protects the self who interprets from its dissolution in interpretation; it turns Fliess into the defeated rival Freud...

From Ontology to Axiology: A Critical Problem

erary work of art, he bases his analysis on Roman Ingarden's Das Literarische Kunstwerk (Halle, 1931; revised edition, Tiibingen, 1960) as the soundest study of the subject. Yet he complains that Ingarden shirks the final task of the critic, evaluation: The error of pure phenomenology is in the assumption that such a dissociation [between structure and value] is possible.... This error of analysis vitiates the penetrating book of Roman Ingarden, who tries to analyse the work of art without reference to value.'

BIDRAG TILL EN FIKTIONOLOGISK EPISTEMOLOGI

A CONTRIBUTION TO NARRATIVE EPISTEMOLOGY | In the wake of Roman Ingarden’s Das Literarische Kunstwerk many literary theorists have claimed that fictional worlds are “incomplete”,contrary to our real world. This idea is critically examined; the conclusion of the examination is that in most cases the incompleteness thesis is based on confusion between ontology and epistemology. However, in some cases – one example is Kafka’s The Process – the thesis is better warranted, but in these cases incompleteness may just as well be described in semantic terms as vagueness.