ABSTRACT
It has long been a commonplace in literary studies, encouraged by the Aris-
totelian tradition which sees poetry as aspiring to universal truth, that literature
has cognitive value in some sense or other. The difficulty has always been in spelling
out exactly how works of the imagination can be, in Horace’s enigmatic terms,
‘‘utile’’ as well as ‘‘dulce.’’ Plato’s warnings of the deceptiveness of poetic fictions
and his insistence that true knowledge is grounded in rational argument alone
have served to temper more extravagant claims for literature’s cognitive powers
and kept alive the need for periodic ‘‘defenses of poetry.’’ The debate once
engaged soon gets drawn into the wider reaches of metaphysics – concerning
truth, reality, knowledge, imagination – while the proliferation of elusive theo-
retical conceptions, ‘‘mimesis,’’ ‘‘realism,’’ ‘‘representation,’’ ‘‘poetic truth,’’ and
so forth, only makes the commonplace assumptions all the harder to defend.
