[Music] we discussed several aspects of structuralism in the previous lectures especially its thesis that the things identity is defined by its place in a structure in this lecture we will look at the work of Vladimir Propp a literary scholar who is often seen as an example of a structuralist even though he came up with his ideas independently of the socio his analysis of the Russian fairy tale is a beautiful example first of what structuralist research in the humanities looks like a second of the thesis that a things identity is defined by its place in a structure so without further ado vladimir bob vladimir pop took a big corpus of russian fairy tales and started to analyze them now obviously one way to do that would be to think about the meaning or message of each of these stories individually that might be the approach taken by a her minutest but prop has a very different aim in mind he isn't so much interested in the particular details of the stories he wants to know about the structure that you can find in every story just like the grammarian doesn't want to interpret the meaning of a sentence but wants to dissect it into a subject an object a verb and other parts and then wants to tell us the rules of how such parts can be combined into sentences in the same way prop wants to dissect fairytales into their components and wants to tell us how they can be combined he wants to understand the structure of the fairy tale the assumption that underlies props whole project is that fairy tales have a fairly determinate structure that beneath their differences there is something that generally stays the same very early in the book Probst gives us some examples of scenes from fairy tales that are different on the surface but in fact play an identical role in the story namely one a Tsar gives an eagle to a hero the ego carries the hero away to another Kingdom to an old man gives soo chenko a horse the horse carries who chenko away to another Kingdom 3 a sorcerer gives even a little boat the boat takes Eve on to another Kingdom for a princess gives Yvonne a ring young man appearing from out of the ring carry even away into another Kingdom in one sense these scenes are clearly different different people are interacting with different objects but there is also a sense in which these scenes are in fact the same there are always two characters fulfilling the same roles let's call them the hero and a donor the hero is on a quest and the donor gives the hero an object that will bring him to where he needs to go so we have the two same basic characters hero and donor and two same basic story events over prop calls functions namely the reception of a magical thing and the guidance of the hero to where he needs to go what prop goes on to do is to systematically investigate all the rules and all the story functions that are to be found in Russian fairy tales let's look at the rules first according to prompt there are exactly seven types of characters in these tales of which the three most important are the hero the princess and a villain let's at them a little more closely so what makes a character a hero you might think that a hero needs to be strong or smart or wise or maybe honorable or courageous and perhaps the hero is most of those things in most of those tales but that's not really what turns him into a hero what makes someone the hero of the story is that he struggles against the villain in order to rescue the princess if there is no villain and if even just marries Veronica because they love each other we don't have a fairy tale and Yvonne isn't a hero on the other hand if there's no princess then there is no reason for Yvonne to ever leave his uncle's farm or his father's palace and again we have no hero so a character is a hero not because of any intrinsic properties not because of any properties of his own but because he plays a certain role in the whole structure formed by the hero the villain and a princess and maybe by some of the other roles as well so we can see here the basic idea of structuralism made I think very clear your identity as a hero depends not so much in yourself but on your place in a larger structure of course what is true for the hero is also true for the other roles you can't be a fairytale villain if there's no princess to abduct and no hero to defeat you just imagine the Aladeen movie without alledon it would be the story of the evil Grand Vizier Jaffar becoming with no serious resistance the absolute ruler of the world and forcing princess just mean to marry him that is not a fairy tale it's I don't know a dark political horror or something but not fairytale in that story Jafar certainly would II would be some kind of villain but he would not have the role of a fairytale villain and so on no role is defined by any intrinsic characteristics the villain doesn't have to be evil the princess doesn't have to be beautiful or even female but they have to be part of the whole structure of the fairy tale roles by understanding that structure we understand the genre of fairy tales better now let us move from the characters from the roles to the narrative functions the general plot events if you wish here prop distinguished thirty-one functions we already saw two of them the receipt of a magical ancient agent in which the hero acquires the use of a magical object because of his good actions and guidance in which the hero is transferred to a location that is vital for his quest but now I want to look at two others because they will help to illustrate that probe doesn't just identify these thirty-one functions but also gives us very clear rules for how they can be combined the two functions I want to look at our interdiction and violation interdiction is a scene in which the hero is warned not to do something for instance before the hero approaches the wood of darkness he is warned never to stray from the path because that would spell disaster or the hero is given a magical boat but he is warned never to fall asleep while he is in it something like that violation on the other hand is a scene in which the interdiction is violated the hero does stray from the path or he does fall asleep in the boat so what combinations of violation and interdiction are possible points out that first if you have violation you also must have interdiction that's pretty obvious right you can't violate an interdiction if there is no interdiction to violate second he points out that violation can only happen after interdiction never before it it never happens that the hero first falls asleep in the boat and is only warned about it afterwards third and more surprisingly prop shows that not only does violation require interdiction but interdiction also requires violation you cannot have an interdiction that is not violated of course you can have that in real life but you can't have it in a fairy tale it never happens that the hero is warned against straying from the path and then he carefully never strayed from the path of course not that would be boring something will happen that makes him stray from the path maybe he hears cries for help or his dogs runs off into the woods and he needs to go after it there is never an interdiction without a violation that is simply one of the rules of the genre prop manages to find quite a lot of rules of the genre which determine which combinations of functions are possible and which are not and what order they can occur in just as linguists can tell us which combinations of words create a well-formed sentence prop can tell us which combinations of story functions create a well-formed fairy tale so he has found not just the structure of the roles of the Russian fairy tale but also the structure of the narrative of the Russian fairy tale a pro pian structuralist analysis obviously works best four genres with rather rigid conventions their shoot for instance be absolutely no problem in applying it to James Bond movies we have the hero we have the villain we have the Bond girl and so on we have a scene in which Bond receives some weird technological toys and we know that for every toy there must be a scene in which he uses it if Bond receives a mobile phone that can explode it will explode at some time later in a movie and so on on the other hand we can imagine that such a structuralist analysis will be much harder to apply to say literary novels or avant-garde movies still structuralism is an important and influential addition to the toolkit of many parts of the humanities and it's key inside that things often are what they are because of the role that they play in a bigger structure is an insight that can be applied in many many fields