| Summary: | Beginning with Plato's expulsion of the poets in the Republic, this dissertation
'
looks at the often hostile, yet also symbiotic, relationship between·poetry and
philosophy. Aristotle's 'response' to Plato is regarded as a significant origin of
literary theory. Nietzsche's critique of Western philosophy as being an attempt to
suppress its own metaphoricity, leads to a revaluation of truth and consequently
of the privileging of philosophy over poetry. Post-structuralism sometimes
overemphasizes this constitutive force of metaphoricity, at the expense of
conceptual modes. However, Derrida's notion of philosophy as play retains a
balance between concept and metaphor: there is no attempt to transcendentally
ground philosophy, but neither is it reduced to a merely metaphorical discourse.
Finally, Wittgenstein's notion of meaning as determined by use can help us
distinguish pragmatically between poetry and philosophy by looking at the
contexts in which they function. === Linguistics and Modern Languages === M.A. (Linguistics)
|
|---|
