Vladimir Iakovlevitch m. , born with Saint-Petersbourg the April 29th 1895 and deceased with Leningrad the August 22nd 1970 is a Russian folkorist of the structuralist school which passed most of its life to analyze the structure of the Russian tale of fantasies to identify their smaller narrative elements of them than he judged irreducible (Greek atoms to some extent).
Its Morphologie of the Tale was published in Russia in 1928; though near to the theses of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes, she was about ignored in Occident until her first translation which occurred in 1950. Its first research purely Linguistic S being revealed not very profitable, m. had the idea to extend the approach Russian, formal, being studied of the narrative structure contale.
In this approach, the sentence is dissected in a series of smaller analyzable elements, the “morphemes”.
Functions according to m.
He studied a multitude of traditional Russian tale of fantasies thus, by cutting off some all that considered to him secondary: the decorative tone, environment, details, the parasitic accounts, etc to keep only their smaller narrative units of them than it called “functions”, and than its successors prefer to call “narratèmes”.M. determined kind, a typology of the narrative structures. While analyzing the action and typestyles in more than one hundred of tales, m. concluded that there was only 31 functions (or “narratèmes”) in the Russian traditional tale. Although they all are not present in all the accounts, all the analyzed tales presented these functions according to an invariant sequence.
- functions of the characters, extremely very few whereas the characters are extremely many . By function , writes it, we hear the action of a character, definite from the point of view of its significance in the course of the intrigue .
It isolates 31 functions (cash each one a number X of alternatives), of which
- the distance
- the transgression
- the mediation
- the recognition
- the punishment, etc
Characters
Then only, m. determines the concepts of characters, in order to answer the question: How the functions distributed are between the characters? They are seven:-
the attacker
- the giver
- the auxiliary (for example the fairy of the French tale, the midwife of the German tale, genius of the Eastern tale, etc)
- the princess and her father
- the mandator
- the hero (or heroin)
- the false hero.
He delimits then the sphere of action of each one of them, i.e. the whole of the functions which interest individually. He gives tale thus the following definition: … from the morphological point of view, any development on the basis of a misdeed or of a lack, and passing by all the intermediate functions to lead to the marriage or other functions used like outcome.
Critical of work
However, Greimas and Courtès, puts a flat at this beautiful analysis: “It is here only about structural semantics of respective actions:- the sphere of action of the reader in particular ds lili and jewels invaluable
- the sphere of action of the giver
- the sphere of action of the auxiliary
- the sphere of action of the princess
- the sphere of action of the mandator
- the sphere of action of the hero
- the sphere of action of the false-hero.
Thus, it underlines the existence of seven characters in the tales to which the functions are distributed.
The “digital m.” project (see bond)
An interesting computing project on-line , employs the Proppiennes functions to generate tales in a random way. But according to the conclusions of the promoters of this project:" Random creation shows that it is necessary to consider several other kinds of elements in order to obtain an at the same time coherent and comprehensible tale. What does not want besides, absolutely not to say that this tale is captivating… ". This project is doubled of a project outline (see bond).
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