The Western Reference of the Vocabulary of Literary Criticism and its Translation into Arabic: The “Romanticism” as a Model

Abstract

This article proposes to outline the Western origins of the vocabulary of literary criticism, and to show how this discourse in the West owes its origins to the terminology of certain schools and doctrines such as classicism, romanticism and realism, and to certain theoretical currents, namely Russian formalism, stylistics, poetics, structuralism and semiotics. It has also adopted various methods of criticism as a source, such as deconstruction, psychological criticism and thematic criticism.

The discourse of literary criticism has often modified the meaning of these terms, updating their content and significance. Due of the epistemological openness to Western criticism, Arab discourse has always borrowed these references and adopted their terminology and vocabulary. This migration does not only mean the transfer of a term from one language to another, but is rather linked to the transfer of concepts with their cognitive and functional contents, and their historical evolution. In this context, this article deals also with the problem of translating the term 'romanticism' into Arabic..