Towards a phenomenology of reading. Ricœur and Husserl in dialogue about imaginative variations in reading fiction texts

Abstract

This text describes the structure of the act of reading, based on imagination, as a meeting between the reader’s awareness and the fictional text. With this purpose in mind, a complementary reading is carried out between Ricœur’s hermeneutics of the text and Husserl’s analyzes of fantasy consciousness, in three moments: 1) making explicit the semantic autonomy of the fictional text on the basis of the constitution of fantasy worlds in the “as if” mode; 2) description of the configuration of the time experience in the act of reading as a mode of neutralization; and 3) description of the splitting of the self in the “as-if” mode constitutive of fantasy worlds in the experience of reading as a condition of possibility of understanding the self (text-reader correlation).