Study On Ingarden’s Dramatic And Theatric Theory

Roman Ingarden is the pioneer of phenomenological aesthetics theory, who skillfully applies Husserl’s phenomenology to the study of the literary and artistic works, which is very creative. Ingarden constantly explores his research field, owing to which he dabbles in a wide range of areas. Drama is one of the most important fields.Ingarden’s dramatic and theatric theory has close relationship with his literary theory. He distinguishes strictly between the concept of "drama" and "theatre", which relegates "drama" to purely literature while "theatre" to another form of art. The two differentiated concepts "drama" and "theatre" are Ingarden’s most important contributions to the history of western drama theory. However, while analyzing concrete literary problems, he endows theatre with too much "literariness". Therefore, at this point, his dramatic and theatric theory reflects certain conventionality.The characters’speech function in theatre has been fully discussed in Ingarden’s dramatic and theatric theory. Ingarden firstly divides three groups of intentional object from the represented world in theatre. And then basing on the three groups of intentional object, he proposes four basic speech functions of the represented characters. According to this, he elaborates the action of a character’s speech in detail from two aspects, namely, external (the hearer) and internal (the speaker) influences. It is undeniable that the proposition of the action of a character’s speech is creative and up-to-date at that time. The creativity is rarely realized by theater theorists at the time; and the theory corresponds to the theory of symbolism drama in some way, which is pioneering at the time.Besides, Ingarden has also explored aesthetic value and artistic performance in drama and theatre. As to aesthetic value, he divides general aesthetic value of art works into three parts:aesthetically valuable quality, aesthetic value quality and multiplicity of properties. The aesthetic value of drama is organic integration of the three parts. With regard to artistic performance of dramatic and theatric works, the analysis mainly focuses on two aspects, namely, represented space and represented time in works. According to the relationship between the represented space and the audience, the represented space in the stage is divided into "closed world" and "open world". Whether it is in "open world" or "closed world", there is always aesthetic distance between the audience and the represented world in work, as a qualified audience must appreciate the theatric art with aesthetic attitude. While the temporality of dramatic and theatric work is mainly presented in the form of temporal schema, which is an imitation of physical time and something quasi-time, and which is not realistic. When we are experiencing dramatic and theatric work, the represented time in it is the same as experience of general literature, which also appears the phenomenon of temporal perspective. However, there are essential differences between the represented time’s way of construction in dramatic and theatric works and other literature works such as novels and lyrics.The research methods of phenomenological aesthetics in Ingarden’s dramatic and theatric theory perfectly combines "time" and "space".The problem of time and space in the theories of drama and theatre are combined with the theory of phenomenology, which jumps out of the traditional research scope of purely physical space and time research in dramatic and theatric theories, and the dramatic study of time and space is extended to another area.