Abstract
Abstract This paper aims to shift theoretical attention from the reception to the production end of literature, and from the literary text per se to the action-process of which it is an outcome. It focuses on the internal activities that bring about literary, or more generally, artistic behavior and suggests that a certain action-process is literature – and the resulting object a literary text – when it stands in a causal relation to a specialised type of creative mental state. This state will be termed the artistic thought state. The idea that literary texts are causally linked to artistic thought states may help provide answers to some persistent ontological questions in literary and art study (e.g. about the ontological status of literary objects as opposed to their linguistic ‘mere thing’ equivalents), and delineate new potential for research in the linguistic study of literature.
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