 Versions of aesthetic formalism come in varying strengths. Its strongest versions hold objects to have aesthetic value strictly in virtue of their perceptual properties (Bell 1958/1914; Danto 2003, 92). Weaker versions either allow objects to have aesthetic value in virtue of their non-perceptual content so long as that content expresses itself perpetually (Zangwill 1998, 71–72) or require merely that objects paradigmatically have aesthetic value in virtue of their perceptual properties (Levinson 1996, 6). All versions of aesthetic formalism struggle, one way or another, to accommodate our long-standing practice of ascribing aesthetic value to objects that do not address themselves primarily to the five bodily senses. Consider works of literature. We have been ascribing aesthetic value to them for as long as we have been ascribing aesthetic value to artworks of any kind. How might the aesthetic theorist square her theory with this practice? A first approach is simply to dismiss that practice, regarding its participants as linguistically confused, as applying terms of aesthetic praise to objects constitutionally incapable of meriting it (Danto 2003, 92). But given how extremely revisionist this approach is, we ought to wait on an argument of proportionately extreme strength before adopting it. A second approach allows that literary works bear aesthetic value, but only in virtue of their sensory properties, such as properties associated with assonance, consonance, rhythm, and imagery (Urmson 1957, 85–86, 88; Zangwill 2001, 135–140). But this approach accounts for a mere fraction of the aesthetic value we routinely ascribe to works of literature. Suppose you praise a short story for the eloquence of its prose and the beauty of its plot-structure. It seems arbitrary to count only the eloquence as a genuine instance of aesthetic value. A third approach treats literary works as exceptional, allowing them, alone among works of art, to bear aesthetic value in virtue of their non-perceptual properties (Binkley 1970, 269; Levinson 1996, 6 n.9). The difficulty here is to explain literature’s exceptionality. If literary works somehow bear aesthetic value in virtue of non-perceptual properties, what prevents non-literary works from doing the same? Moreover, to whatever degree we allow things to have aesthetic value in virtue of their non-perceptual properties, to that degree we sever the connection the formalist asserts between the aesthetic and the perceptual and so undermine our reason for adopting aesthetic formalism in the first place.