The phenomenon of fiction

The subject of the work is the problem of the fictionality of literary texts. The work is divided into three parts. The first part deals with the nature of poetic language. The central thesis is that literature cannot be perceived as a set of objective attributes of a given statement but as the way utterance affects the reader, that is, as a phenomenon. This assumption allows us to define fictionality tentatively as a phenomenon or as an aspect of the phenomenon of literature. The second part introduces a critique of the theory of fictional world. The objections are concerned with the concept of the world as an aggregate of objects, characters and events, relation between the texture and the fictional world viewed as mediating representation, the concept of literary creation as a translating of extensional plane to the intensional one, and the concept of reading as the reconstruction of fictional objects. The third part suggests an answer to the problem of the fictionality. Considering Patočka's essay Učení o minulém rázu umění the phenomenon of literature is defined as the flowing of objective component of experience into the non-objective one. The fictional object is thus conceived as the vanishing object in the sense of its becoming the non-object