Contrasting Formalistic and Structuralist Approach to Literature

Rocel Mae Roca

In understanding literary texts using the formalistic and structuralist approaches, one
would give focus on the forms of the texts of literature for these approaches reduced
the importance of cultural, biographical, or historical influence on a literary text. As
they both emerged in the early 1900s, these literary approaches give emphasis on
the structural characteristics that define a text as literature or poetry particularly on
its grammar, syntax, plot structure, roles, and characters.

Formalism, as per its name, focuses on the formal features of a text—literary

techniques like meter, rhyme, and so forth—and disregards questions of history or
the biography of the author to interpret the text. Structuralism extends formalism's
aspirations to deal with only the text itself, striving to create an objective study or
"science" of literature. It is the study of a text without taking into account any outside
influence. Formalism rejects (or sometimes simply "brackets," i.e., ignores for the
purpose of analysis) notions of culture or societal influence, authorship, and content,
and instead focuses on modes, genres, discourse, and forms.

Structuralists search for a "literary grammar," for the universal, abstract structures
that govern a text's meaning, believing literature to be just one among many forms
of verbal communication. Structuralism tries to compare every piece of literature to
every other piece of literature and tries to reduce them to simple structures.
structuralist criticism relates literary texts to a larger structure, which may be a
particular genre, a range of intertextual connections, a model of a universal narrative
structure, or a system of recurrent patterns or motifs. Structuralism argues that there
must be a structure in every text, which explains why it is easier for experienced
readers than for non-experienced readers to interpret a text. Hence, everything that
is written seems to be governed by specific rules, or a "grammar of literature", that
one learns in educational institutions and that are to be unmasked