• Classical Criticism: Aristotle's Poetics and early critical thought.

• Romantic and Victorian Criticism: Theories of taste, beauty, and aestheticism in writers like Wordsworth and Matthew Arnold.

• Formalism and New Criticism: Close reading techniques, analysis of text structure, and emphasis on the autonomy of the text.

• Structuralism: Language as a system of signs, structuralist theories of meaning (Saussure, Barthes).

• Post-Structuralism and Deconstruction: Derrida's theory of meaning, the instability of texts, and the rejection of fixed interpretations.

• Marxist Criticism: Literature as a reflection of class struggle, ideology, and materialism (Marx, Eagleton).

• Feminist Criticism: Analysis of gender roles, patriarchy, and the role of women in literature (Woolf, Beauvoir, Mulvey).

• Post-Colonial Criticism: Literature of the oppressed, colonial discourse, and the effects of imperialism (Said, Fanon, Spivak).

• Psychoanalytic Criticism: Freudian analysis of characters, symbolism, and the unconscious mind in literature (Freud, Lacan, Kristeva).

Introduction to Literary Criticism serves as a foundation in understanding how literary texts are analyzed through various critical lenses. The subject focuses on theoretical frameworks that have emerged over time and examines how they influence interpretations of literature.

Students will be introduced to key literary theorists like Aristotle, Samuel Johnson, Matthew Arnold, Roland Barthes, and Judith Butler. The course encourages students to engage with these theories critically and apply them to literary texts in order to understand how meaning is constructed in literature.

Topics covered will include the development of literary theory, the function of criticism, and the evolution of different schools of thought, as well as contemporary approaches to literary analysis.