The idea that the perspectival structure of fictional discourse is crucial for its representation of temporality finds an extended exploration if we change tradition from semantics, and the way that semantics has informed contemporary narratology, to the phenomenology of internal time-consciousness, and by extension, to phenomenological approaches to the temporality of literature. A foundational argument here is Roman Ingarden's discussion of temporal perspective in The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, which explores the idea of temporal perspective in fiction as a special case of the more general phenomena of temporal perspective in the human experience of time. As a special case of time in general, it might seem as if this is not an account of the kind I have just described, that values the discrepancy between fictional, semiotic time on one hand and lived, experiential time on the other, and it is certainly true that much of Ingarden's argument emphasises the similarity between the concretisation or cognition of the literary work and the experience of time flow in general. Ingarden divides his analysis into two issues: the apprehension of the work during reading, and the cognition of the work after reading, and much of the similarity he establishes between reading and living belongs to the first of these questions. Much of this turns on the idea that, in reading, there is a quasi-present, or a part of the work that is ‘vividly present to us’, and although it need not be, this part of the work is often identical with the semantic unit of the sentence: the quasi-present of the reader is the present sentence.