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 main points of Goodman's dissertation were made in a 1934 article on aesthetics by the author, who studied with the philosopher Richard McKeon and other neo-Aristotelians at the University of Chicago.

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 obscured his argument.

The author, Paul Goodman, identifies as a man of letters, referring to the belles lettres intellectual tradition that descended into the professionalized, academic format known as literary criticism.

[9] The central points of this late dissertation, according to literary critic Kingsley Widmer, were published in Goodman's 1934 article on aesthetics in The Journal of Philosophy.

[12] The book applies this method to a series of individual literary works (plays, poems, verse, novels, short stories, and film) as examples, using a combination of close reading and genre discussion.

He also describes Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1 and John Dryden's verse satire Mac Flecknoe as a mix of comic and serious plots.

He performs a close reading of John Milton's "On His Blindness" and Lord Tennyson's "Morte d'Arthur", with formal analysis of "texture" elements like word sound, weight, syntax, tone, and metaphor.

In the first of four examples, Goodman discusses how the heavy symbolism Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "The Minister's Black Veil" sublimates into mystery.

In the examples of a translation of Baudelaire's sonnet "La Géante" and a film adaptation of Eugène Labiche's play Un Chapeau de Paille d'Italie, Goodman notes how formal elements change within transformations of works, such that character, rhythm, syntax, theme, and other elements change from the original format.

[18] Goodman ends with an analysis of Pierre Corneille's 17th-century tragedy Horace that uses his inductive formal method alongside other critical modes to highlight the play's psychology of war.

The poet Nicholas Moore wrote that this effect on the reader extends to the lively book as whole: irritating or amusing in style, with a persuasive, painstaking scholar underneath.

[12] Literary critic Harry Levin agreed that the method had no "special light to cast"[23] and the poet Nicholas Moore said, despite describing the book as a "tour de force", that Goodman had not entirely fulfilled his argument.

[26] As a result of processing literary works into highly technical abstractions, critics wrote of his analysis being reduced to vague generalities.

[29] Goodman's method, said Levin, redefines concepts like "God" or "sin" by their structural use within a work, like a kind of "literary behaviorism" that produces categories ultimately more conceptual than artistic or formal.

[15] The author's tone, wrote the Times Literary Supplement, frequently swaps between "high-falutin' critical terminology" and "quite excessively American colloquialisms".

[26] Reviewers criticized some of Goodman's plot definitions as being "unfitting",[42] "imprecise",[32] "circularly defined",[30] or "lacking consistency or rigor in their application".

[43] For instance, although Goodman defines Oedipus and Philoctetes as serious plots, one reviewer wrote that the two are so disparate in final effects that the categorization loses its definitional value.

[29] Goodman later wrote four "Cubist plays" in which he meant to illustrate the ideas of his dissertation by making characters into archetypes and abstracting its use of plot.