Peter Lamarque su verità e valore letterario. Alcune riflessioni critiche

Among the views defended by Peter Lamarque in his well-structured and well-argued account of literature, there is a sceptical claim about the role of truth and knowledge in accounting for the artistic value of literary works. Obviously, he does not deny that literature can be a source of knowledge; what he questions, however, is that the possible cognitive value of a work contributes to its artistic value. Roughly, the idea is that aims and expectations of writers and readers are, among other things, normative for literary value and that, while we read e.g. a philosophical or scientific work to learn some truth, we do not read a novel with the same aim; instead, in a novel we look for, above all, that particular kind of pleasure which originates in our imaginative engagement with the narrative content, the description of characters and places, the evocative use of the language, etc. In this article, Lamarque’s conception is largely endorsed; however, it is suggested that the thesis that truth is not significant for artistic value should not be generalized to all literary works. At least in some cases, the cognitive value of a literary work might contribute to its artistic value. Though a fully developed defence of this view is not provided, the article raises doubts, on the one hand, on the exclusion of cognitive expectations from the literary point of view and, on the other hand, on Lamarque’s implicit adoption of propositional truth as a paradigm. It is argued that in particular from this latter assumption a rather narrow conception of the ways in which literature can be a source of knowledge is derived.