ABSTRACT
One undoubted reason for the recent flourishing of instrumental approaches in literary studies is the perceived inadequacy of the account of literature provided by the aesthetic tradition as mediated by New Criticism and similar critical approaches. The aesthetic tradition unwittingly demonstrates the powerful social determinants of the artwork and its reception; but to say this is not necessarily to dismiss as valueless its insistence on the impossibility of reducing the artwork to rules. Such an insistence seems to reflect a valid insight into the peculiar nature of art as a practice and institution characteristic of Western cultures. The experience of beauty, so crucial to the aesthetic tradition and so clearly an important aspect of our response to many works of art, cannot be taken as a defining property, both because its extension to all art is problematic and because it is equally an aspect of our response to many natural objects.
