PHENOMENOLOGY OF READING

Phenomenology is the study of phenomena in which ‘phenomena’ refers to things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meanings of things have in our experience. Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced from the object of the experience. Phenomenology is a branch of philosophy which studies consciousness as a result of human intuitive experience toward any object of their life. Phenomenology puts the intuitive experience of phenomena as its basic of analysis and tries to find the essential features of experience and the essence of what has been experienced by human beings.


Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) was considered as the founding father of phenomenology. He was the pupil of Franz Brentano (1837-1917) and Carl Stumpf (1848-1936). The main concept which had given by Husserl was ‘intentionality’ which explains the relationship between mental acts and external world. This term describes that the main characteristic of consciousness is that it is intentional. The way it is directed through its content or meaning toward a certain object in the world. He borrowed the term ‘intentionality’ from his mentor, the philosopher and psychologist, Franz Brentano.

Every mental phenomena or psychological act is referring to a certain intentional object. The intentional objects are the manifestation of psychological consciousness. This difference as being an intentional object and an intentional object will distinguish the physical and psychological activities. This argument is very important since the key point of experience is that it refers toward an object. The consciousness gained from experience is the consciousness of an intentional object.

In this essay, I will try to elaborate some theories dealing with the phenomenology of reading in which it tries to explain about how the readers gain meaning of a literary text. This theory is part of the reader-centered approach where the reader is the one who fold the meaning of a text. Writing as ‘grammata’–the writing form, printed form of literary or graphic mark of pages –is not the accomplished fact of meaning. Writing as ‘grammata’ is the potential of meaning and it is characterized as the phenomenological expectation of meaning and required to become the object of he readers’ consciousness, literary text will only b the phenomenological expectation of meaning of literary text. The act of reading is a mental process since the figure in the text will become imaginative figures in the readers’ mind.

According to Georges Poulet (1902-1991) a literary text is the combination between author’s consciousness and reader’s consciousness. Literary text is not only an object of a single subject but it belongs to two subjects, the author and the reader. This means that meaning of a literary text does not exist if it is only in a book without anybody reading it. The meaning of a literary text is modified by the reader’s consciousness from the first meaning which is folded by the author’s consciousness. He supported his argument further; that all books are as dead objects until someone reads them. The book needs the reader’s consciousness to exist. The existence of a book is not only in itself but also in the reader’s mind.

The reality of a literary text is gained from the reader’s consciousness. The way in which the reader tries to create the reality is a mental activity. When a reader reads a literary text, the figure of words, sentences, ideas, images of the text will become mental images in the reader’s mind. The way the reader interpret a literary text is influenced by the reader’s consciousness which they gain from their experiences. The interpretation of a reader will be different from others’ interpretation in interpreting the same text because everyone has different experiences which also make them to have different forms of consciousness. This difference also applied in the case that the reader would also give different interpretation from the author since they do not share the same experience.

Wolfgang Iser (1926- ) proposed that an important idea of indeterminacy where inside a literary text there are gaps and blanks which stimulate readers to construct meaning. Furthermore, he said that literary text is two-sided which are phenomenological and neumenonical. The first side of the literary text is that it is appear in the reader’s consciousness after the reader has the experience of reading the literary text and in the other side; literary text brings meaning in itself. In phenomenology, literary text brings in itself the guidelines, clues, specification, and cues to actualize as maximum meaning by reading the text.

Iser described three main points of analysis in his essay ‘The reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach’: the process of anticipation and retrospection, the consequent unfolding of a text as a living event, and the resultant impression of lifelikeness and these points of analysis will explain the relation between reader and text.

When a reader reads a literary text, the reader will reconstruct the world of the literary text by relating every sentence in the text to make a reasonable meaning in the reader’s consciousness. However, a reader cannot materialize the world in the literary text visually, he will visualize it in his imagination. Roman Ingarden (1893-1970) was the one who gives theory that reading is the concretization of meaning. Literary text is not autonomous in the meaning and it is not concrete, it depends on the readers. He argued that the world presented in a literary text is constructed out of intentionale Satzkorrelate (intentional sentence correlatives). Ingarden said that sentences linked up in different ways to form more complex units of meaning that reveal a very varied structure giving rise to such entities as a short story, a novel, a dialogue, a drama, etc.

While reading a literary text, a reader tries to relate a sentence to the next sentence. Through this process, a reader is able to fill he gaps which occur between sentences. The sentences in a literary text cannot fully concretize the visualization of the world in the literary text. In every literary text there is always a gap which should be fulfilled by the reader. If the author gives he full picture in his work, his work can be assume as a bad work of art since this kind of text will lead to boredom. The reader should be given spaces in literary text where they can create the world in their imagination. Their imagination is also part of their consciousness. Iser called the world presented after such act as the virtual dimension of the text. What the reader imagining in the act of reading is only the unwritten part of the text with the guidance of the written part. That is why if in a text there are no elements of indeterminacy, there are no gaps and blanks to fill, the reader will not be able to use their imagination to visualize the world in the literary text.

After reading a literary text, the meaning of the text will be absorbed by the reader’s memory and when the reader re-reads the text, his interpretation of the same text might be different. This thing happens because the reader already has the experience of the world in the literary text and it will effect their expectation in the second reading. The reader will be able to anticipate the relationship between ideas of the text and also there is a probability that the reader’s interpretation will be different because a text has potential of multiplicity interpretation. Meaning of a text is inexhaustible. The multi interpretation of a literary text will never exhaust its meaning. In the act of reading, the reader will connect the time sequence in the text. It will help them to construct the virtual dimension of the text. The process to build the virtual dimension of a text is a living process since the reader should continually try to relate one phrase to another in the text.

The text brings the nature of disturbance toward the reader’s expectation and this will lead to frustration of expectation of the reader. The disturbance can come in the flow of time sequence in the text. The reader will create different visualization of the literary world in every act of reading. The reader’s imagination will concretize this visualization by processing the information given in the literary text. The process of concretization of the meaning of literary text will lead the reader to form ‘gestalt’ of the text but ‘gestalt is not the true meaning of the literary text. ‘Gestalt’ is the result of the colliding of reader’s mind and the literary text. ‘Gestalt’ is merely a configurative meaning of the text.

The reader’s expectation upon the meaning of the literary text will lead them into illusion because he world presented in the literary text is not the true reality. This illusion appears because in interpreting a literary text, reader tend to restrict the polysemantics tendencies to have a valid form of the visualization because according to Wolfgang Iser, the polysemantics nature and the illusion making of the text are opposed factors. If the semantics factor of a text already fixed, then the illusion will be complete.