Intersubjectivity in literary narrative

In this process, we are able to perceive the literary text as a genotype, and the realization of the fictional world as a phenotype, constructed not only by the aggregate of all the signs in the text, but also by the environment in which the individual receptive activity of the reader operates. [...] The present study aims to revisit the role of the subject in the light of mimesis theory, and the urgency of the questions it raises in the theory of fictional worlds, mainly following the model that Lubomir Dolezel has “canonized,” after many years’ reflection, in his essential book, Heterocosmica (1998). [...] She shows how we as readers of fiction approach the game of “as if,” and we behave “as if the actual world of the textual universe were the actual world.” Once again, she raises the question of the relation of the fictional world to the real one in the process of re-construction. [...] The Subject According to the Prague School The Prague structuralists connected the question of the subject closely with the concept of the semantic gesture, as the point of maximum meaning in the work where, according to Mukarovsky, both author and recipient participate. [...] The subject may remain 20 Intersubjectivity in Literary Narrative hidden in (but in no way absent from) the work, as for example in the “objective” epic, or, on the contrary, be realized more or less strongly (through first-person narration, the emotional cast of the work, the identification of the poet with one of the characters within the work, and so on).