  The work begins by attempting to determine the ‘mode of existence’ of the literary work — essentially the same problem that today goes under the heading of understanding the ontological status of works of literature, music, etc. In twelve concise pages, he provides compelling reasons to reject both attempts to identify literary works with “real” objects or events such as copies of texts or the psychological experiences of authors or readers, and attempts to identify them with platonistic “ideal” objects such as ordered manifolds of sentences or meanings. Each such attempted identification leads to various absurdities, e.g. the view literary works are physical objects would lead us to say that such works differ by chemical composition; the view that they are experiences of the author would make them completely unknowable, while the view that they are experiences of readers would prevent us from postulating a single work Hamlet known by many readers; and the view that they are ideal objects would entail that literary works may never be created and cannot be changed, even by their authors.