The article contains a general substantiation of theoretical and applied literary criticism as a course of study within the framework of higher philological education, which is focused on the critical and analytical examination of literary texts from the point of view of the argumentation system, linguistic and compositional features presented in them, and at the same time on the assimilation of the genre “rules” of the final qualification work. The relevance of this discipline is determined by the need to bridge the gap between the teaching of fundamental aspects of the literary criticism and the development of practical skills in analyzing not only artistic, but also scholar and critical-literary text, as well as the increasing applied importance of philology in the modern world. The directions of coordination of various perspectives of work with a literary text, taking into account the achievements of related fields of knowledge: linguistic stylistics, rhetoric and academic writing, are outlined. The methodological pluralism underlying the course makes it possible to correlate historical and scientific retrospective and current state of literary studies; principles of immanent and contextual analysis; specialized and interdisciplinary approaches. The clarification of the constitutive components of qualification research is achieved indirectly, through the analysis and convincing interpretation of the precedent text for literary criticism, which implies the differentiation of manifest and conceptual levels, typical and unique features in it. The combination of different kinds of collective and individual assignments during the course development, on the one hand, forms the primary professional competences, and on the other hand, motivates students to scientific reflection and self-representation, because in literary studies, with its hermeneutic and axiological components, the supporting role of intuition, the personality of a scholar is not only included in the cognitive process, but also cannot completely excluded from the results obtained.