AbstractI discuss the phenomenological approach to the creative apprehension of a literary artwork along the lines set out, from the 1930s to the 1960s, by the Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden. Responding to a revival of interest in phenomenological proposals concerning language and its products, I focus specifically on the problem of ‘indeterminacy’, an inherent feature of both the linguistic system and the fictional worlds that support many literary texts, as envisaged by Ingarden. His works in the area of cognitive philosophy and aesthetics of literature, known to the readers outside Poland in not too numerous German and English versions, still merit the attention of contemporary scholars since they connect well with several frameworks that have taken up the issue of ‘gap-filling’ and its cognitive import. In brief, I would like to bring closer to the reader’s attention the issue of ‘places of indeterminacy’ in texts and text worlds and of their ‘concretization’ by the interpreter, according to the Ingarden model (discussed comprehensively by, among others, Wolfgang Iser). I argue that with some possible modifications, it is still relevant to the study of aesthetic response to both verbal and non-verbal texts from the perspective of phenomenology, cognitive studies and the neuroscience of the arts.
One text, many stories: The (ir)relevance of reader-response criticism for apocryphal literature in the Septuagint