ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author contributes to an international conference on Style and Structure in Literature at the University of East Anglia in 1972. The debts they readily acknowledge is to the Russian Formalists of the 1920s who laid the foundations for new systemic ways of analysing literary texts and accounting for literature as a psychological and social phenomenon. The function of the Narrative Structure which builds events into an easily perceived and graspable pattern. A generative approach to poetics begins to make it possible to account for 'narrative universals,' actions and objects to produce an infinite variety of possible textual realisations. Exaggerated claims and bogus scientism must be avoided in the study of such complex organic structures as works of literature. Perhaps the best poetics will combine the virtues of the analytic, functional approach and the synthetic, generative approach. For the time being, both can help thoughtful and sensitive critics to write good literary criticism.
