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Abstract
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-à-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.