It's an interesting question. I note that you don't ask whether literature can "establish" the truth, or "discover" the truth, or "distinguish" the truth. It's also interesting that you ask about "truth" and not "knowledge" or "wisdom"--though you do seem to suggest that literature is one among a number of other areas of "knowledge." And what of "tell"? What does it mean exactly to "tell" a truth? And what of "better"? What can it mean to "tell better" or "tell worse"? Of course, one question I'd have at the outset would be what you consider literature to be. I take it that you mean fiction and poetry. But of course some also would speak of biography, journalistic writing, history, film, song, and what has become known as "creative non-fiction" as literature, too. Philosophers like Stanley Cavell have explored the question of whether or not philosophy might be read as a kind of literature, whether it might even come to regard itself as literature. So far as it goes, I am inclined to say that...

First, I would like to say that I don't think there's a clear or distinct line marking the difference between "literature" and "philosophy." Rather, I think that philosophy is a type of literature, or better a family of sub-types of literature. My own sense is that for any specified criteria distinguishing philosophy and literature, significant exceptions can be found. Plato and Kierkegaard use characters and plot, Kundera writes essays, Nietzsche is poetic, Berkeley wrote dialogues, Heraclitus and Wittgenstein are oracular, aphoristic and paradoxical, Dostoevsky uses arguments, etc. Having said this, as a rule one might say that philosophy uses fictitious character, plot, setting, and poetic trope in a less central way. It's easier to think of philosophy without plot or character or metaphor than it is to think of fiction or poetry. One might also, I think, say that philosophy has more often aspired to formulating general truths and doing so through modes of argumentation, while other forms...