ABSTRACT
Literary critics, in their theoretical moments, are sometimes inclined to suppose that certain philosophical preliminaries must be accomplished before their proper business of doing criticism can be gotten on with. This chapter argues that the question about the "mode of existence" of works of literature is an illegitimate question that arises out of what is basically two sets of confusions. The first of these is the result of certain misunderstandings of the depth grammar of the word "poem" in general and of names of individual works of literature in particular. The second, which is no doubt more philosophically significant as well as the more difficult to deal with, is the result of a mistaken description of what literary criticism is like. Literary criticism cannot be a matter of first identifying an object and then describing it by reading off its characteristics. As a matter of fact, the only identification that is usually relevant is that of a text.
