4. Literature as aesthetic object The features of literature discussed so far the supplementary levels of linguistic organization, the separation from practical contexts of utterance, the fictional relation to the world-may be brought together under the general heading of the aesthetic function of language. Aesthetics is historically the name for the theory of art and has involved debates about whether beauty is an objective property of works of art or a subjective response of viewers, and about the relation of the beautiful to the true and the good. For Immanuel Kant, the primary theorist of modern Western aesthetics, the aesthetic is the name of the attempt to bridge the gap between the material and the spiritual world. between a world of forces and magnitudes and a world of concepts. Aesthetic objects, such as paintings or works of literature, with their combination of sensuous form(colours , sounds) and spiritual content(ideas). illustrate the possibility of bringing together the material and the spiritual. A literary work is an aesthetic object because. with other communicative functions initially bracketed or suspended, it engages readers to consider the interrelation between form and content. Aesthetic objects, for Kant and other theorists, have a purposiveness without purpose. There is a purposiveness to their construction: they are made so that their parts will work together towards some end. But the end is the work of art itself, pleasure in the work or pleasure occasioned by the work, not some external purpose. Practically, this means that to consider a text as literature is to ask about the contribution of its parts to the effect of the whole but not to take the work as primarily destined to accomplishing some purpose. such as informing or persuading us. When I say that stories are utterances whose relevance is their'tellability I am noting that there is a purposiveness to stories(qualities that can make them good stories) but that this cannot easily be attached to some external purpose. and thus am registering the aesthetic, affective quality of stories, even non- iterary ones. A good story is tellable. strikes readers or listeners as worth it. It may amuse or instruct or incite, can have a range of effects. but you can't define good stories in general as those that do any one of these things.