Arabic Literary Criticism Program

Arabic Literary Criticism Program

Do you want to acquire efficient research skills in literary criticism?
Is your ambition to become a specialist academic critic, cultural critic or critic in any field?
Are you interested in the future of critical theory in the Arab world and Europe?

Our specialist experts in literary criticism and critical theory share their knowledge to fulfil students’ ambitions


Brief Description

This program targets undergraduate and postgraduate Arab and non-Arab researchers, journalists and writers, and those who wish to learn the techniques of criticism across a number of disciplines that providing cognitive maturity in critical configuration.

This unique program deals with basic issues concerning theoretical and practical strategies in the field of literary criticism including:

  • literary theory
  • the crossover between literary theory and criticism
  • textual curricular and contextual criticism
  • formalism and stylistic narrative methods
  • semantics and structure
  • structuralism and postmodernism
  • the principles of psychoanalysis, gender and feminist studies
  • Marxism and historicalism
  • post-colonialism
  • environmental and cultural criticism

The courses aim to direct critical knowledge to the student, researcher or trainee in order to attain the ability to read texts, and literary and artistic discourses professionally and with a systematic approach that serves different academic, research and current cultural orientations.

The ultimate objective of the program is to help both Arab and non-Arab researchers develop their cognitive and systematic techniques in the fields of literary and critical studies.

The First Course

set sthe boundaries that separate literary and critical theory, and textual and contextual curricula as well as studying special curricula such as Russian formalism and stylistics in a way that combines theoretical approaches with different miscellaneous applied practices.

The Second Course

demonstrates narratives, beginning with basic concepts and advancing through theories and methodologies of structural and narrative analysis regarding the cultural narratives followed in literature. The course also considers the combination of theoretical approaches with different miscellaneous applied practices.

The Third Course

deals with semantic, structural and post-structural approaches whether in philosophical references or Arab and occidental applications in a balance between theory and practice.

The Fourth Course

studies the recognition of postmodern theses whether in their artistic and architectural sense or in textual cultural connotations. The course also deals with references to Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysis in an attempt to combine theoretical and practical approaches on one hand and Freudian and post-Freudian approaches on the other.

The Fifth Course

includes the study of feminist perspectives in occidental culture either by questioning and analysing the context in which it was created and how it was received or by questioning Arab feminism and the extent of its presence in old and modern literature. In addition, the course explains Marxist philosophy as a vision of the world and a critique of speeches.

The Sixth Course

deal with so-called new historicalism and its achievements in providing new readings to place history and society in the cultural body of texts and speeches. It also deals with post-colonialism through theory, discourse and practice as well studying the achievement of post-colonial perspectives in producing different readings of Arabic narrative discourse.

The Seventh Course

studies the concepts and texts of environmental criticism and their analytical tools, as well as the relationship between environmental with Arab criticism through working on the concept of nature and geography in texts. Finally, course looks at so-called ‘post …’ concepts such as  post-modernism, post-structuralism and post-colonialism etc. from a cultural perspective and studies dichotomies such as similarities vs. differences, theories vs. practices.

The Eighth Course

is devoted to cultural criticism and its different textual practices whether in theoretical references or critical speeches as well as studying articular shifts in the history of world criticism from theme to structure to rhythm in an ambitious attempt to predict the future of literary criticism and theory in the twenty-first century.