A Comparative study of the Structural Interpretation and Formalist Critique

Discussion about the interpretation and poetics methods is one of the interesting subjects in the academic literary studies in the contemporary period and many schools have emerged in this field. Formalism is one of the first schools of literary criticism in the present time. It maintains that the meaning of a text is discovered through knowing its form and purpose. Similarly, some of the interpretive studies on the Holy Quran are about the ways of its reading and interpretation and in this regard, several methods have been introduced by Islamic commentators. Structural Interpretation is one of these approaches that has received considerable attention in the field of Quranic studies in the current decade. According to this method, the meaning of surah is dependent on its purpose, and by analyzing the structure of the surah, its purpose and meaning can be discovered. Since the scientific study of a theory includes its comparison with other scientific views, it is necessary to compare this method with other criticism schools such as formalism. So, in the present study, the principles of the structural interpretation and its practical approach were compared with the formalist critique and their similarities, and differences were represented.