  As with so much of Ingarden’s philosophical work, he undertakes this study of the ontology of the literary work in part with the motive of utilizing its results to argue against transcendental idealism — indeed he conceived of The Literary Work of Art as a preliminary study for The Controversy. Literary works and the characters and objects represented in them were to provide examples of purely intentional objects — objects owing their existence and essence to consciousness. Thus a detailed study of works of literature and their represented objects could serve to explicate the purely intentional mode of being, with a view to contrasting this with the real mode of being and ultimately demonstrating that it is impossible to reduce the ‘real world’ to the status of a purely intentional creation. [Streit, vii-viii]. Nonetheless, this motive remains largely behind the scenes of the detailed studies of language and literature in The Literary Work of Art, which can be (and largely has been) described and evaluated without reference to these broader motives, as an independent contribution to aesthetics and literary theory.