Charliepaulcmp's Blog

Session 3 Wed 13 Oct: Modernist practices: realism and formalist challenges to narrative

Definitions of structural linguistics on the Web:

• structuralism: linguistics defined as the analysis of formal structures in a text or discourse
  wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

Structural linguistics has exceeded traditional grammar in several ways. It has allowed for more structural analysis of words and word formations, has allowed for the identification of phrasal verbs (a new class), has brought attention to analyzing and identifying helping verbs or modals, and has caused analysis of the English tense system which was previously ignored. Some structural linguists were able to discover structures and patterns in English which were buried in the language and were not previously noticed due to their lack of similarity to Latin.

Barthes’s “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives” is concerned with examining the correspondence between the structure of a sentence and that of a larger narrative, thus allowing narrative to be viewed along linguistic lines. Barthes split this work into three hierarchical levels: ‘functions’, ‘actions’ and ‘narrative’. ‘Functions’ are the elementary pieces of a work, such as a single descriptive word that can be used to identify a character. That character would be an ‘action’, and consequently one of the elements that make up the narrative. Barthes was able to use these distinctions to evaluate how certain key ‘functions’ work in forming characters. For example key words like ‘dark’, ‘mysterious’ and ‘odd’, when integrated together, formulate a specific kind of character or ‘action’. By breaking down the work into such fundamental distinctions Barthes was able to judge the degree of realism given functions have in forming their actions and consequently with what authenticity a narrative can be said to reflect on reality.

work on narrative from the 1960s onwards) Todorov suggested that stories
begin with an equilibrium or status quo where any potentially opposing forces
are in balance. This is disrupted by some event, setting in chain a series of
events. Problems are solved so that order can be restored to the world of the
fiction.

tales to see if they shared. any structures. His book on this ‘Morphology of the
Folk Tale’ was first published in 1928) Propp looked at 100s of folk tales and
identified 8 character roles and 31 narrative functions.