Abd- Al Rasoul Shakeri, Masoud Farahmandfar,
Volume 8, Issue 19 (4-2021)
Abstract
Literary criticism has been one of the most controversial issues in the study of literature in Iran. Some have considered it an entirely Western area of study and therefore imported to the country, while others have traced its history back to pre-Islamic Iran. By distinguishing between the two terms of rhetoric as a premodern subject and literary criticism as a modern area, this paper examines the evolution of literary criticism in Iran from the years of the Constitutional Revolution to the early 2010s. These developments have been studied in four historical periods: from the beginning to 1941, from 1942 to 1978, from the Islamic Revolution to the late 1990s, and from the late 1990s to the early 2010s. The results show that despite the dominance of the discourse of literary criticism in literary studies and its successful examples in the recent decades, the application of this area to reading texts still has a long way to achieve greater success. Meanwhile, the emergence and the prevalence of interdisciplinary and problem-oriented studies in reading texts in the global academic environment have added to the complexity of the situation.
