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20 | Digital Media and Storytelling in Higher Education
different types of sagas and distinguished the so-called pseudo-sagas, which
resemble sagas only in their formal features (von Sydow, 1948; Dömötör,
1969). There are also textual variants of the different story types. Ethnographic
storytellers are often confronted with the fact that the storyteller mixes the
turns and events of his or her own life story into the act of storytelling, and
uses the skeletons of different story types as a foundation on which to build
individual episodes, interspersed with typical rhetorical turns (Balint, 2014).
Another direction in the study of narrative is represented by the Russian
formalist ethnographer Propp, who explored the components of the magic tale
in addition to their relationships to each other and to the narrative as a whole
using a morphological approach borrowed from botany. Propp’s (1928/1999)
method of analysis was to collect the constant, common (invariant) elements
of narratives and explore their relationships to each other. Propp found that
the structure of magic tales consists of units around which certain motifs can
be grouped. The motifs can be very diverse, but the structure is the same in
all magic tales. In his study, Propp structured the tales according to actions
and assigned a function to each action. He found that the recurring elements
of fairy tales include roles that are linked to the roles of the actor: the hero,
the false hero, the villain, the dispatcher, the helper, the donor, the princess, and
often the father. One role may correspond to one character, but there may
also be cases where one character is associated with more than one role, or
where one role is fulfilled by more than one character. Propp also considers
it important to look at the attributes of the characters, (ie., their external
characteristics such as age and gender).
Instead of the motifs of the tale, Propp examined the function of the
characters in the narrative. Functions are seen as the main building blocks
of the tale on which the whole plot is based. Propp described a total of 31
functions, with so-called auxiliary elements creating transitions between
them, such as information, repetition (usually triplication) of actions or
attributes, or motivations (i.e., reasons and goals that motivate actions). In
Propp’s division of functions, most of them form pairs of opposites (e.g.,
struggle-victory and elimination of scarcity-absence).
Like Propp, Lévi-Strauss (1955) undertook a structural analysis of texts
as well. He considered the mytheme as the fundamental generic unit of
the narrative structure of myths. Lévi-Strauss adopted an ethnographic
perspective, and he not only described the deep structure of the narrative
but also explored the role of narrative in mythic thought. Barthes and Duisit
(1975) differentiated the functions of the story from a different point of
view. The key functions are cardinal to the understanding of the story; they
provide its skeleton, and without them the text is unintelligible. The cardinal
functions are important for the details of the story. Those story elements that
refer to the motivational background of the story are called indexical marks
by Barthes, while those that refer to the circumstances of the story are called