Morphology of the Folktale (Publications of the American Folklore Society)

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Summary: Bah
Review: This book is so confusing, everyone in class think it's stupid. Bottom line: He attemps to classify tales when it is an impossible task to do, and criticizes others for trying to do what he can't even do himself.

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Summary: Ian Myles Slater on: Brilliant, But Hard Going
Review: This is an attempt to work out the underlying structural patterns (types of characters, what they do, how they are ordered) of Russian folktales, based on classic collections made in the nineteenth-century. If you are fortunate enough to have read a large collection of such stories -- preferably in translation, not "retold by ..." -- you will soon see the point of Propp's argument. Other European, and some non-European, traditions provide an almost equally good starting point, although the examples often are not so close as to be immediately convincing. Ideally, "Morphology of the Folktale" would be bound with at least a selection of the Russian folktales Propp analyzes, but this does not seem likely to happen.

Taken by itself, however, Propp's exploration is going to seem both dry and confusing. Try to imagine a book about the five-act structure of Shakespeare's tragedies, if you have never seen or read a play before, and you may understand the problem.

Although Propp's exposition sometimes seem labored, he presents a convincing case that at least some oral prose narratives are built up of a stock of situations and events which can be slightly reordered, multiplied, and otherwise complicated, but amount to a "language" of story-telling. This puts a new light on the problem of the distribution of folktales, and how they develop variants, two of the great issues of folklore studies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Despite its origins in a single body of oral literature, Propp's methods have been applied to other literature with known or suspected oral roots, sometimes with slightly contradictory results. I know of at least two diffeent Proppian analyses of "Beowulf," for example. This is due at least in part to Propp's attempt to introduce fine divisions between similar plot elements, which, again, seem to work better with his source material than with other groups of stories.

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Summary: This seminal work is excellent
Review: This seminal work is essential for an understanding of structuralist theory and the theory of folklore. It differs from the psychological view of the folktale in its descriptive ability. This theory is based on objective description and sytagmatic conjunction and complementation. Because of that, it is more applicable and flexible than any psychological dissection. Also, two people will reach roughly the same conclusions with this method- something impossible with a psychological approach. This is excellent for anyone interested in attacking the down and dirty working parts of a narrative.