Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

3.1 ’Form’ and ‘structure’
Unit 3 Analysing units of structure
Section 1 Basic techniques and problem-solving

When we talk about texts, we use categories. It would be almost impossible not to. Such categories include not only text types, or genres (see Unit 4, Recognizing genre), such as sonnet, thriller or tragedy, but also smaller-scale elements of composition that make up those text types: verse, rhyme, sentence, character, etc. Is there a list of correct and incorrect categories that we should use? And are textual categories just a part of metalanguage, or how people talk about the language of texts, or do they actively guide understanding or even shape composition?

Texts, we might say, have a sort of ’mechanics’. They are constructed for a purpose, with anticipated meanings and effects likely to be prompted by the chosen combination of signs. Intuitive judgements about the elements that combine to form an overall text can be a starting point for interpretation, and so contribute to the active process of understanding as making meaning outlined in Unit 1, Asking questions as a way into reading. For example, an arrangement of textual components that has interesting regularities, or forms a pattern, can point towards a text’s meaning and significance. To understand how a text works, we are accordingly helped by finding out about its units of structure and how they combine. The field of stylistics - whether discourse stylistics generally, or literary stylistics - is based on this insight: that interpretations are guided to a significant extent by perceptions of structure that can be described, even if they are not always immediately evident to the reader.

Consider the twelve-bar blues as an illustration. The blues form consists, with some variation, of the following units (among others): three groupings of words, as lines, with the second line a repeat of the first, and with each line harmonically accompanied by particular chords in a given sequence of bars. In this description, lines, chords and bars are important units of structure for the twelve-bar blues. Here is a verse from a twelve-bar blues in the key of C:

We cannot, of course, be certain that the labelling offered here is a ’correct’ description of the units; the singer and subsequent performers may not themselves use such terms and many admirers of the blues might not recognize them or feel that these units are significant in their listening. Nor can we be certain that the list is exhaustive or comprehensive. How many times, for example, is the chord strummed each bar and what is the unit for that? We cannot presume, either, that the grouping of elements, as units, matches real distinctions rather than simply reflecting categories we have chosen to impose. On the other hand, without some notion of units of structure (lines, chords, bars), it would be impossible to describe what distinguishes the blues from other forms that prompt fairly consistent judgements that, whatever they are, they are not blues.

3.1 ’Form’ and ’structure’

Units of structure are also called formal elements, and sometimes formal properties. The terms ’structure’ and ’form’, each of which has a long history and has given rise to critical movements (formalism and structuralism), are used here simply to describe the arrangement of elements in a text. It should be noted, however, that these terms are used widely in discussion of aesthetic objects and texts with varying meanings and implications.

3.1.1 ’Form’ as coherence and unity

One sense of ’form’, which has a long history in philosophy since Plato, considers it as an underlying essence or ideal of something that exists beyond its physical manifestation. ’Form’ in this sense is something inherent, beyond analysis. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) developed the term organic form to capture the idea that aesthetic form occurs or grows of itself, naturally, rather than being a human or social construct. In New Criticism (an American literary theory at its height between the 1930s and the 1960s), the idea of organic form in literature takes on an added dimension: poetic ’form’ is said to involve a complex balancing of potentially conflicting elements (hence the emphasis placed in New Criticism on irony, paradox and ambiguity). What unites this sense of form with the Platonic sense is that, in each case, formal elements are seen as in some sense inseparable from the text as a whole. By contrast, when we refer to formal elements in this unit, we are working with a different assumption: that it is possible to isolate and examine individual formal elements.

3.1.2 ’Structure’

The term ’structure’ is also commonly used in discussion of how formal elements in a text are arranged. Structure refers to the ’insides’ of a text: its network or system of underlying relations, which can be discovered by analysis. But here again it is worth remembering that there is another common use of the term ’structure’, which refers to the text itself (a use analogous to calling a house or a bridge a structure).