POLYONTOLOGY OF THE FICTIONAL WORLD IN PHENOMENOLOGY OF LITERATURE

Abstract

The research has been conducted within the phenomenological theory of literature and the literature studies and addresses the relevant direction in studying the phenomenon of an author and his consciousness. The objective of the work is to apply the procedure of concretism to situations in fiction with features of polyontology. Polyontology is understood as multiple layers of being of the intentional world or an intentional object of a particular fictional text. The theoretical significance of the research lies in the description of the intentional existence of the literary work with regard to its schematism in the consciousness of the author and the concretism in the consciousness of the reader. The author of the paper refers to the theory of R. Ingarden, according to which, a fictional piece of work gets the status of the esthetic object only in the concretised form in the readers’ consciousness (when concretism is treated as a form of collaboration between the author and the reader). The results of the research are based on the interpretation of works by S. Maugham, I. Murdoch and A.S. Byatt. The author of the article gives her version of concretism of the motif of Russel’s teapot in Murdoch’s novel “A Word Child.” The paper states the specific being as a scheme for the intentional worlds in short stories by S. Maugham. The work defines the tendency of A.S. Byatt to offer the reader ready-made concretisms in her novel “The Virgin in the Garden.”