Roman Witold Ingarden’s discussions on artistic style: A contribution

Abstract

The present article attempts to reconstruct Polish philosopher and aesthetician Roman Witold Ingarden’s views concerning his understanding of the concept of artistic style. Starting from the hypotheses provided by the content of the outline of his ultimately unwritten work, Poetics, I have chosen selected threads of the discussions held by Ingarden in Lviv before the war, supplemented by the content of the phenomenologist’s lectures from the 1960s, as essential substantive background. Analyzing the material indicated, I demonstrate that it is appropriate for Ingarden’s understanding of artistic style to correlate this concept with the category of aesthetic concretization. Consequently, I draw a conclusion as to the primary role of some aspects of a literary work – appearances, which allow us to inquire into the properties of artistic style practically as a result of their function of decorativeness and polyphony. A condensed comparative analysis of the two functions, as related to excerpts from Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz’s Insatiability, concludes the account of Ingarden’s conception of artistic style, which turns out to be a unique aphenomenal phenomenon.