What has made literary or critical theory more than another fashion in the discipline of literary study is the fact that the possibility of theory in general has repeatedly been at stake. Nevertheless, much modern literary criticism and literary history, even a lot of what passes as ‘new historicism’, remains implicitly committed to positivistic assumptions that there is some easily accessible literary object to be described,’ classified, related to general cultural processes, etc. These positivist assumptions of literary history overlook one major question – what sort of object is a literary text?

In fact, the mode of being of the literary is, in itself, a virtual repudiation of positivism. It does not take ‘deconstruction’ to tell us this. That the literary text is not an object is one of the arguments of Roman Ingarden's classic The Literary Work of Art of 1931. A similar conclusion is to be found in chapter 12 of René Wellek's and Austin Warren's Theory of Literature (1949). This chapter, written by Wellek and heavily indebted to Ingarden, demolishes various accounts of the literary text as any sort of empirical or psychological entity. It is not (a) an artefact like a piece of sculpture, that is, the physical page(s) or book, (b) the real sounds uttered by someone performing the text, (c) the psychological experience of hearing or reading it, (d) the experience of the author in creating it, (e) nor, finally, is it the totality of readers' experiences or even quite what all of them have in common (which would be merely a lowest common denominator).