Towards an epistemological critique of literary theory: the truth of the poem and the mathema in Plato´s The Republic

Abstract

In the present work the objective is not only to approach in an epistemological key to the specific question asked by literary theory (which necessarily becomes the construction of an object of study) but rather the question, mediated by the idea of truth, that philosophy (specifically, that of Plato) has done to literature. We believe that in Plato's texts there is a fundamental intuition that implicitly has set in motion multiple theoretical devices that tried to account for literature. The intuition, without delay, is the following: poetry is not mathematical. Our interest then is to recognize the peripheries of the dialogue inaugurated by Plato between the concept of truth (always mutable) and the idea of literature, as well as their reciprocal determinations, and their pregnancy (always ignored/unheeded) in the discourses that have addressed literature in a theoretical key.