  A stratified theory like Ingarden’s has considerable strengths. It provides a framework within which we can offer detailed analyses of literary works identifying their many sorts of value or disvalue, rather than simply passing judgment on the whole. As a result, many apparent conflicts in judgments of taste may be resolved without embracing subjectivism, by noting that the individuals concerned may be passing judgment on different strata of the literary work. It also enables us to understand stylistic differences among authors and over time as differences in which strata are emphasized and which de-emphasized, e.g. as many modernist works de-emphasize the traditionally foregrounded stratum of represented objects in favor of juxtaposed images at the level of schematized aspects (e.g. Virginia Woolf’s The Waves), or even background both of these to the rhythms and sound patterns at the level of phonetic formations (e.g. Edith Sitwell’s nonsense poetry). Yet we can do so without seeing such changes as forming a radical break or undermining the idea that these are all part of a continuous literary tradition.