Revisiting the traditional virtues of the hero : a phenomenological study of Wilfred Owen’s disabled soldier

Abstract

Thanks to critics like Roman Ingarden and Wolfgang Iser, we treat the literary object as a phenomenon actualized and then maintained in being through the reader’s effort in realizing the poem, that is, only through irony, paradox, metaphor, metonymy, and other aesthetic techniques that perform the text as a portrayed world. Real external entities, such as a disabled war victim, attain to a poetic existence, such as Wilfred Owen’s mutilated soldier in the poem “Disabled,” by virtue of this aesthetic effort, fulfilled each time literary comprehension is felt to have reached beyond a previous inadequate degree of realization.