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Abstract

The article examines the question of the nature of literature within the broader field of the humanities, showing how literary discourse—since Plato—has remained an epistemically ambiguous domain because of its imaginative power and its capacity to unsettle rational notions of truth. From this standpoint, the text traces the epistemological shifts that have shaped the history of literary theory, from Aristotle’s concept of mimesis to contemporary approaches that expose the instability of fixed meaning and the openness of the text to multiplicity and semantic fragmentation. The article also addresses the issue of interpretation, recalling the emblematic confrontation between old and new criticism. It argues that the history of literary inquiry is not a record of settled truths but a succession of “productive errors” that broaden the horizons of understanding. Methodologies—structuralism, historicism, semiotics, and others—hold no absolute authority; their value lies in the effectiveness of their application and their ability to animate the text rather than in the rigidity of their theoretical frameworks. Hence emerges a methodological anxiety shaped by the reader’s cultural horizon and the constraints of their interpretive community. Furthermore, the article shows that literature is a dynamic structure resistant to fixation, as it weaves the linguistic with the cultural and reconfigures collective memory, myths, and symbols within new contexts of meaning. The text, as a network of signs, moves along the threshold of memory and oblivion, of aesthetics and power, granting interpretation an open and inexhaustible potential. The study concludes by advocating for an integrative approach that combines linguistic and semiotic analysis with an acute awareness of the cultural and ideological frameworks underlying literary production, enabling us to grasp literature as a continuously regenerating semantic and aesthetic practice resistant to closure.

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