David Michael Levin explains, “[i]n Das literarische Kunstwerk, translated for the first time, here, into English, Roman Ingarden has employed the powerful method of phenomenology in order to penetrate the underlying ontological essence, or mode of being, of the literary work and to make explicit the corresponding side of subjectivity, within whose structures the underlying modes of givenness peculiar to the literary entity are lawfully established” (xvi).THAT DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE MR.LEVIN. THAT IS UNHELPFUL. WHY DO EVEN YOUR NOUNS SEEM TO ME VERB-LIKE? WTF. This is how literary criticism ceases to be useful: when the subject becomes massively amorphous and the language becomes uberspecific, and between these two things, the work itself ceases to exist. The indefiniteness of the "idea" and the opacity of the language take over, like an interpretive dance inside a waterfall: where everything appears to mean something but actually its just wet nonsense.
Isn't it the work of the critic to make clear(er) for the reader the big ideas and to use language to his/her advantage? I want distillations of thought, people, not mystical "modes of givenness."
