The main task for imagination in Roman Ingarden’s theory of literary work is to reconstruct fictional objects and their appearances, as well as to furnish details even not mentioned in the work but compatible with the schematic description contained in the work. Imagination, therefore, plays an essential role in the act of Ingardenian ‘concretization’, that is in an inner presentation of the written work by the mind of the reader. According to the program of anti‑psychologism, the imaginative activities do not belong to the literary work. In particular, the creative imagination of the author and the free inspirations experienced by a reader must not be regarded as part of the work. Ingarden understands imagination traditionally, as the ability of visualizing mental images. It is possible, however, to understand imagination in a different way, that may be called semiotic, when it becomes an art of giving meaning to fictitious, fantastical, metaphorical and symbolical sentences. Adopting such a conception of imagination reveals imaginative features in all the four levels of literary work indicated by Ingarden. In particular, the notorious Ingardenian ‘quasi‑judgment’ could be defined as the imaginative sentence.

This article argues that the short story ‘Ave Patria, morituri te salutant’, first published in a book of Stanisław Reymont's short stories in 1907, shows an overwhelming influence of the expressionist aesthetic. It is conspicuously present in the story's stripped-down sentences, spiked with highly emotive (animal) imagery, and cast in lines that move inexorably towards the catastrophic end. It manifests itself in the disillusioned, sarcastic tone which the writer uses to take up old certainties like military glory and patriotism. Finally, it brings to the fore the conflict between man and nature, man and the universe, the individual and the crowd. As all of those elements are evidently part of the narrative and dramatic structure of ‘Ave Patria…’, it should be viewed as an exemplification of Reymont's drift from realism to modernism (preexpressionism). That transition is also signalized by the tripartite structure of the story. The divisions are worked out with the precision of a master craftsman assembling ‘an epic clock’ (to borrow a telling phrase from Kazimierz Wyka's analysis of the structure of The Peasants), or a painter designing a triptych. The article pursues the latter analogy further by discussing the impressionist technique of framing and cutting off the dispensable elements of the picture.

Whereas Ingarden’s studies on the strata of the literary work of art have attracted considerable critical attention, it is not the case with the other building-block of his theory, the concept of the literary work’s temporal phases. It was ignored by the French structuralists and the American pragmatists, and, more recently, by neuroscience, although the latter is founded on insights that are similar to Ingarden’s. A comparison of the two approaches shows that his concept of temporality remains as relevant as ever. It is an analytical tool of remarkable precision that can be used to examine schemas of understanding conditioned by the sequential nature of language, especially in case complex schemas elicited by utterances with many themes and hardly any temporal or causal links. Ingarden’s analyses shed light on the analogically-functioning memory mechanisms that generate cognitive schemas responsible for the integration of the experienced objects. Drawing on Edmund Husserl, Henri Bergson and philosophers of the Lvov-Warsaw School, Ingarden assigned the key role in that process to foreshortening and the retention-protention mechanism. After identifying these sources of inspiration it is possible to suggest an alternative solution to the problem of the cognitive value of neuroscience narrative protocols and to situate current developments in narratology in a broader conceptual framework.

Artykuł dotyczy kategorii jakości postaciowej (Gestalt) w estetyce Romana Ingardena. W części pierwszej zostały przywołane stanowiska filozofów i estetyków wysuwających własne, na ogół fragmentaryczne, interpretacje tego pojęcia. W części drugiej rozpatrzono określony wariant rozumienia jakości postaciowej – literacką jakość postaciową, realizującą nadto podtyp brzmieniowy. Rozważany literacki wariant jakości postaciowej można do pewnego stopnia utożsamić – w wypadku dzieł sztuki najwyższej rangi – z jakością metafizyczną.