The Structure of Literature

The Structure of Literature is a 1954 book of literary criticism by Paul Goodman, the published version of his doctoral dissertation in the humanities. The book proposes a mode of formal literary analysis that digests a literary work into structural elements based on the reader's experience (rather than descriptive elements of the text) and recombines those parts to explain the work as a whole. Goodman analyzes several literary works as examples with close analysis and genre discussion.

The main points of Goodman's dissertation were made in a 1934 article on aesthetics by the author, who studied with the neo-Aristotelian Richard McKeon at Columbia University and the University of Chicago. Goodman finished his dissertation in 1940, but it was only published in 1954 by the University of Chicago Press at McKeon's behest. Reviews aggregated in Book Review Digest were of mixed favor and disfavor. Critics described the book as falling short of its aims, with engaging psychological insight and incisive asides mired in glaring style issues and jargon that made passages impenetrable or eclipsed his argument. Though Goodman contributed to the development of what became known as the University of Chicago's Chicago School of Aristotelian formal literary criticism, he neither received wide academic recognition for his dissertation, nor was his method accepted by his field.