The Problem of Poetics. A Central Question, Some Marginal Answers

Abstract

Regardless of the idea that one may hold about literature, and whether or not we agree with Sartre, the question of literary commitment is one that every writer confronts, even if it is just to deny it. Indeed, the idea of commitment establishes the basis for a new conception of poetics: an active idea (in the Nietzschean sense of the expression), that goes beyond any reactive definition that would reduce poetics to a simple search for some objective criteria that would make it possible for us to consider a text –oral or written– as a “literary work of art” (Genette, Barthes, Todorov). Through an analysis of the works of Ricardo Piglia, Juan José Saer and Mario Vargas Llosa from a philosophical perspective, we aim to re-inscribe, in the context of the theory of culture, a strong idea of poetics, as the self-determination of the subject, the object and the purposes of literature.