Vladimir Propp

Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp - (17 April 1895- 22 August 1970) was a Russian and Soviet formalist scholar who analyzed the basic plot components of Russian folk tales to identify their simplest irreducible narrative elements.

Biography

Vladimir Propp was born on April 17, 1895 in St. Petersburg to a German family. He attended St. Petersburg University (1913–1918) majoring in Russian and German philosophy. Upon graduation he taught Russian and German at a secondary school and then became a college teacher of German.

His Morphology of the Folktale was published in Russian in 1928. Although it represented a breakthrough in both folkloristics and morphology and influenced Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes, it was generally unnoticed in the West until it was translated in the 1950s. His character types are used in media education and can be applied to almost any story, be it in literature, theatre, film, television series, games, etc.

In 1932, Propp became a member of Leningrad University faculty. After 1938, he shifted the focus of his research from linguistics to folklore. He chaired the Department of Folklore until it became part of the Department of Russian Literature. Propp remained a faculty member until his death in 1970.

Theory

Vladimir Propp extended the Russian Formalist approach to the study of narrative structure. In the Formalist approach, sentence structures were broken down into analyzable elements and Propp used this method by analogy to analyze Russian fairy tales. By breaking down a large number of Russian folk tales into their smallest narrative units, Propp was able to arrive at a typology of narrative structures. After the initial situation is depicted, the tale takes the following sequence of 31 functions.

He also concluded that all the characters could be resolved into 8 broad character types in the 100 tales he analyzed:

1. The villain — struggles against the hero.
2. The dispatcher —character who makes the lack known and sends the hero off.
3. The (magical) helper — helps the hero in the quest.
4. The princess or prize — the hero deserves her throughout the story but is unable to marry her because of an unfair evil, usually because of the villain. the hero's journey is often ended when he marries the princess, thereby beating the villain.
5. Her father — gives the task to the hero, identifies the false hero, marries the hero, often sought for during the narrative. Propp noted that functionally, the princess and the father can not be clearly distinguished.
6. The donor —prepares the hero or gives the hero some magical object.
7. The hero or victim/seeker hero — reacts to the donor, weds the princess.
8. False hero — takes credit for the hero’s actions or tries to marry the princess.

Applying the theory to a contemporary blockbuster hit

Harry Potter character types-

1. The villain — Lord Voldemort 

2. The dispatcher — Rubeus Hagrid 

3. The (magical) helper — Ron Weasley

4. The princess or prize — Ginny Weasley

5. Her father — 

6. The donor — Dumbledore 

7. The hero or victim / seeker hero — Harry Potter

8. False hero — Draco Malfoy

Shrek character types- 

1. The villain — Lord Farquaad

2. The dispatcher —

3. The (magical) helper — Donkey

4. The princess or prize — Princess Fiona

5. Her father — King Harold

6. The Donor —

7. The hero or victim/ seeker hero — Shrek
8. False hero —