Roman Ingarden's "points of indeterminateness"

A consideration of their practical application to literary criticism

Joseph Strelka

pp. 157-169

in: Hans Rudnick (ed), Ingardeniana II, Deventer, Kluwer, 1990

Abstract

In his books The Literary Work of Art and The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art,1 Ingarden deals with an aesthetic phenomenon for which he coined the well formulated name “Unbestimmtheitsstellen”, or “Points of Indeterminateness.”2 Due to the special structure and the connotative character of the language of a literary work of art, this phenomenon constitutes one of the most essential elements of such a work and is of greatest significance for Literary Criticism. Although Ingarden points out the importance of Points of Indeterminateness to some extent, his pioneering and all-embracing work on the theory of the arts and especially of literature forces him to limit the discussion of it to the “stratum of presented objects”, the third of the four strata or layers which, according to his theory, establish the work in its entirety; hence, he has devoted not more than ten pages in his first and seven pages in his second book to this problem.

Cited authors

Ingarden Roman Witold