Hans H. Rudnick - Böcker

This Ingardenia volume is the second in the Analecta Husserliana series that is entirely devoted to the phenomenology of Roman Ingarden. The first was volume IV (1976). Twenty years after Ingarden's death, this volume demonstrates that the Polish phenomenologist's contribution to philosophy and literary scholarship has received world-wide attention. His ideas have proven especially fruitful for the definition of the structure of the literary work of art and the subsequent recognition of its characteristic features. Of all the early phenomenologists who were students of Husserl, it is Ingarden whose work has faithfully pursued the original tenet that language "holds" the essence of the life-world "in readiness" (bereit halten). To investigate this premise with the rigor of a science, as Husserl had envisioned for phenomenology, was Ingarden's life work. That Ingarden did not quite reach his ambitious goal does not diminish his unquestionable achievement. The understanding of the nature of the literary work of art has increased enormously because of his analyses and aesthetics. The Polish phenomenologist investigated above all the work of art as a structure of necessary components which define and determine its nature. That the artistic ingredient was shortchanged under those conditions should not be surprising, particu­ larly since Ingarden usually kept a purist's philosophical distance from the concrete detail of the material under consideration. He was not concerned with individual works of art but with the principle that was shared by all of them as the defining feature of their being.

Parody: The Art That Plays with Art explodes the near-universal belief that parody is a copycat genre or that it consists of a collection of trivial and derivative forms. Parody is revealed as an über-technique, a principal source of innovation and invention in the arts. The technique is defined in terms of three major variations that bang, bind, and blend artistic conventions into contrasting pairings, the results of which are upheavals of existing conventions and the formation of unexpected and sometimes startling and revolutionary new configurations. Parodic art fashions a galaxy of contrasts, and from these stem an illusionistic sense of multiplicity and an array of divergent meanings and interpretive paths. This book, an extreme departure from existing analyses of parody, is nonetheless highly accessible and will be of major interest not only to scholars but to general readers and to professional writers as well. Parody: The Art That Plays with Art is particularly suited for readers interested in modernism, postmodernism, meta-art, criticism, satire, and irony.