ABSTRACT
The aims and the scope of research conducted by analytic philosophy of art is rather narrow and cannot be easily said to challenge or compete with literary theories. In the early forms of phenomenological criticism, as represented by Poulet and the Geneva School, what was perhaps considered the chief value of literary art was that it enabled encountering and merging with a different consciousness. A systematic study requires, according to Wellek and Warren, a methodology entirely separate from those of other disciplines, a methodology which is literature-specific. Ignoring or marginalizing empirical authors, their lives and their intentions is considered a staple of much of the formalist-structuralist tradition, including also New Criticism, semiotics, post-structuralism and the more recent ideological approaches to literature. The theory states that an artwork is whatever is considered an artwork by a member of the institutions related to art, the artworld.
