ABSTRACT
To ask “what is the ontological status of the literary work?” is to ask what sort of an entity a work of literature is: Is a work of literature a physical object one can hold in one’s hands and see with one’s eyes; or is it an abstract sequence of letters, words, or meanings; or perhaps even a performance of a particular kind by an author that takes place in a particular cultural and historical context? Questions about the ontology of works of literature are tied up with questions about the existence, survival, and identity conditions of works of literature, and in general about their modal properties. We might wish to know what it takes for a work of literature to exist: does a work of literature have to be brought into existence by an author, or should we think of authors instead as somehow ‘discovering’ their works? If we think a work of literature must be created by an author, does the author have to write down a poem to create it, or could it come into existence just ‘in the poet’s head’? Could the same short story have come into existence in a completely different cultural context, with different cultural practices or a different literary history? We might also wonder what sorts of change a work of literature can survive: If all copies of a novel are destroyed, does it cease to exist? If copies remain but all capable readers of it die, does the novel survive? Questions about identity conditions for works of literature are also relevant here: If a novel is copied wrongly, is the copy an instance of the same work as the original? If I read a Rilke poem in translation, am I reading the same poem as my German friends?
