【正文】
rom Vladimir Propp39。s Morphology of the FolkTale (1928), which appeared in French translation in 1957 and in English in 1958. English material ? Propp noted that, though the individual characters in Russian tales were very diverse, their functions (villain, helper, etc.) could be described in a limited number of terms (he suggested thirtyone, falling into seven superordinate categories). By reference to these elements, the narrative ordering of any tale could be recognised as a sequence of 39。functions of the dramatis personae and associated actions. This is in fact a generative grammar of narrative: a finite system (paradigm) of abstract units generates an infinite set of narrative sequences (syntagms). English material ? The linguistic analogy was seized on by L233。viStrauss ... It became a standard assumption in narratology that the structure of a story was homologous with the structure of a sentence。 this assumption allowed the apparatus of sentencelinguistics to be applied to the development of a metalanguage for describing narrative structure ... AngloSaxon reaction to structuralism has been almost universally hostile, deploring its mechanistic and reductive style and suspecting its exponents of a kind of leftwing philistinism. English material ? Structuralism as a concept is grand, controversial and elusive. For our purposes it is to be understood at two levels of generality: first, as a broad intellectual movement, one of the most significant ways of theorizing in the human sciences in the twentieth century。 English material ? Fortunately, the response in France has been more subtle and more positively critical, confronting problems of what is neglected in the structuralist approach: reader, author, discourse as municative practice and as ideology ? (Roger Fowler, Structuralism, in Roger Fowler (ed.), A Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms (Routledge: London, 1973。 1987), pp. 23235). Contents