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Abstract

The present study seeks to demonstrate the strong relationship between the various sciences and the practice of literary criticism, and to contribute to the shaping and development of critical programs. This occurs in parallel with the treatment of literary texts, the assimilation of their structural nature, and the subsequent uncovering of their allegorical and symbolic connotations. It has therefore been necessary to attend to the ways in which scientific disciplines contribute to the development of the mechanisms of literary criticism. Among these fertile sciences are mathematics, logic, and empirical forms of knowledge, followed by the human sciences such as history, sociology, psychology, and linguistics. This scientific interaction has yielded tangible results in the elaboration of curricula and in the assimilation of texts from multiple angles—structural, semantic, and hermeneutic—in addition to historical, social, and psychological analyses. Given that most literary structures are of a metaphorical, suggestive, and symbolic nature, and that what appears on the surface does not necessarily disclose what they conceal, they call for additional means to support what critical methods have accomplished. To address this issue, it has been proposed that the metaphorical, suggestive, and symbolic dimension requires supplementary faculties, namely introspective and intuitive capacities. This has manifested itself, in an almost rational manner, in hermeneutic currents that have adopted the principle of “suspicion,” calling for caution prior to any act of interpretation. The aim has been to curb the excesses of scientism, which seeks to attain absolute truths without regard to their essentially relative outcomes. This leads us to affirm that contemporary hermeneutic criticism benefits from a range of disciplines in its approach to literary texts, allowing for a form of reflection that often moves away from definitive truths and opens onto interpretive hypotheses and possibilities, thereby enriching an ongoing dialogue around these works.

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