First Variation. Philosophy and Literature: a Hypothetical Comparison between different Approaches

Abstract

1 What is literature? One could naively answer: any kind of written work could be considered literature, just think about its Latin origin, “littera” (letter). Nonetheless nowadays we tend to adopt a more restrictive use of the term literature as referring to those written accounts somehow showing literary, aesthetic merit. According to this more restrictive use, we say that Crime and Punishment written by Fedor Dostoevskij and In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust are good examples of lite...