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This article deals with literary criticism's history, from its origins to its demise and the rise of the so-called "critical theories" as taking over from the former. The first part of the article sets literary criticism's history from its beginnings in German romanticism to its end in French structuralism and poststructuralism. The thesis is that literary criticism, as all the other human sciences, has been a historical institution which Western modern society has developed throughout the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. The paper defends that bourgeois society, through literature and art, endowed the modern subject with an aesthetic view that constructed it as subject and that, literary criticism, thus, became the institution, among the human sciences, which provided et scientific discourse on literature. Finally, the attention is drawn to the crisis of bourgeois society at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, which brought in the crisis of literature and its criticism. As a result, the paper continues, literature evolved to states of social isolation and self-referentiality, and literary criticism endeavoured to give account of the retreat of literature from society through different formulations based on the concept of "form".
The second part deals with critical theories. They are explained as rising from the transformation of modern society into the postmodern cultures of postindustrial societies. Emphasis is placed on the consequent transformation of postmodern subjectivity which becomes fragmented into all forms of subjectivity that were excluded by modern society: women, third world, masses and so on. The second thesis of the article is that critical theories are different discourses accounting for the modern exclusion of those subjectivities and that these discourses are taking over the human sciences. Finally the article defends that critical theories create discourses that make possible the development of the aforementioned forms of subjectivity in postmodern cultures. The approach is basically historiographical and updates recent similar accounts in Spanish and Basque.
