Lesson 5: Syntagmatic Analysis

Sequential Relations (1)

"...narratives reduce the unique or the unusual to familiar and regular patterns of expectation."
(Andrew Tolson 1996, 43)

Narratives provide structure and coherence. In this respect they are similar to schemas for familiar events in everyday life. Of course, what constitutes an 'event' is itself a construction: 'reality' cannot be reduced objectively to discrete temporal units; what counts as an 'event' is determined by the purposes of the interpreter. However, turning experience into narratives seems to be a fundamental feature of the human drive to make meaning. Some theorists have argued that 'human beings are fundamentally story-tellers who experience themselves and their lives in narrative terms' (Burr 1995, 137).

In order to explain the structure of a myth, Levi-Strauss classified each mytheme (the shortest possible sentences in a myth) in terms of its 'function' within the myth and finally related the various kinds of function to each other. Class assignment 1 (group work, done orally): 1. Recollect the story of 'Little Red Riding-Hood' and break it into "the shortest possible sentences" then combine them into groups according to their functions and decide whether the results of your work might help you understand the meaning of the story. 2. Compare your results with the table presenting similar analysis made by Victor Larrucia. Class assignment 2 (group work, done orally): Read the description of a fairy tale pattern below and try to create the one applicable for "Little Red Riding Hood". Make use of all appropriate cliches from the description. In a highly influential book, The Morphology of the Folktale, Vladimir Propp interpreted a hundred fairy tales in terms of around 30 'functions'. 'Function is understood as an act of character defined from the point of view of its significance for the course of the action' (Propp 1928, 21). Such functions are basic units of action. The folktales analysed by Propp were all based on the same basic formula: The basic tale begins with either injury to a victim, or the lack of some important object. Thus, at the very beginning, the end result is given: it will consist in the retribution for the injury or the acquisition of the thing lacked. The hero, if he is not himself personally involved, is sent for, at which two key events take place. He meets a donor (a toad, a hag, a bearded old man, etc.), who after testing him for the appropriate reaction (for some courtesy, for instance) supplies him with a magical agent (ring, horse, cloak, lion) which enables him to pass victoriously through his ordeal. Then of course, he meets the villain, engaging him in the decisive combat. Yet, paradoxically enough, this episode, which would seem to be the central one, is not irreplaceable. There is an alternative track, in which the hero finds himself before a series of tasks or labours which, with the help of his agent, he is ultimately able to solve properly... The latter part of the tale is little more than a series of retarding devices: the pursuit of the hero on his way home, the possible intrusion of a false hero, the unmasking of the latter, with the ultimate transfiguration, marriage and/or coronation of the hero himself. (Jameson 1972, 65-6)

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Resources for Lesson 5:

Chandler, Daniel. Semiotics for Beginners.

Student Essays (Daniel Chandler's course)

Brooks, Cleanth & Robert Penn Warren (1972): Modern Rhetoric (Shorter 3rd Edn.). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Tolson, Andrew (1996): Mediations: Text and Discourse in Media Studies. London: Arnold

http://www.teamsputnik.co.uk/blog/CategoryView,category,Little%2BRed%2BPolitically%2BCorrect%2BRiding%2BHood.aspx

http://justfad.blogspot.com/2008_08_01_archive.html

Burr, Vivien (1995): An Introduction to Social Constructionism. London: Routledge

Larrucia, Victor (1975): 'Little Red Riding-Hood's Metacommentary: Paradoxical Injunction, Semiotics and Behaviour', Modern Language Notes 90: 517-34

Propp, Vladimir I ([1928] 1968): Morphology of the Folktale (trans. Laurence Scott, 2nd edn.). Austin: University of Texas Press

Jameson, Fredric (1972): The Prison-House of Language. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press