Literary Criticism.

Catalog description

Semester course; 3 lecture hours. 3 credits. A comparative study of critical approaches to literary texts (reader-oriented, new critical and formalist, psychoanalytic, archetypal, feminist and gender-oriented, structuralist, poststructuralist, new historicist and postcolonial). These approaches will be evaluated in terms of their capacity to address major components of the literary process (author, text, reader, history, culture); they will also be tested on selected literary texts. Some attention is given to the historical development of criticism, but the primary focus is on its theoretical claims, methodologies and aims.