A Critique of the Idea of Literary and Musical Works

Abstract Ordinary language pictures a literary or musical work as something having both a material and an immaterial aspect and the capacity to appear, in its entirety, in several different places at once. Such a conception is handy in undemanding contexts, but it does not make intellectual sense, and its unreflective use in literary studies and musicology has palpable negative consequences for the theoretical understanding of what takes place when literature and music are composed and enjoyed. In my paper I will first introduce the ordinary-language idea of a literary or musical work and offer a more rational way of representing the underlying realities. I will then discuss the theorising of literary and musical works in analytic aesthetics, concentrating on the mainstream view that such works truly exist and are abstract entities, I will maintain that literary and musical works certainly exist mind-dependently, as mental constructs useful in some contexts but not in others, but that no good reasons to believe in their mind-independent existence have been given.