Roman Ingarden

Roman Ingarden (1893–1970) was a Polish philosopher and phenomenologist, a student of Edmund Husserl, who made foundational contributions to aesthetics and the ontology of the literary work of art. His major work, The Literary Work of Art (1931), developed a phenomenological theory of the text as a multi-layered structure consisting of: (1) the sound stratum, (2) the meaning units, (3) the represented objects, and (4) the schematized aspects. Ingarden's concept of the text as a schematic structure with intentional gaps that the reader must fill was a direct influence on Wolfgang Iser's reader-response theory. He also argued that the literary work is an intentional object — neither purely mental nor purely physical — that exists in a mode of being he called heteronomous, dependent on consciousness for its concretization while remaining independent of any particular consciousness.