The philosophical and aesthetic foundations of literary theories; Anglo-American new criticism and Russian formalism; Czech structuralism between Kant, Hegel and the avant-garde; problems of reader response criticism - from hermeneutics to phenomenology; from Marxism to critical theory and postmodernism; the aestheticis of semiotics - Greimas, Eco, Barthes; the nietzschean aesthetics of deconstruction; Lyotard's postmodern aesthetics and Kant's notion of the sublime; towards a critical theory of literature.