Oldal 21 [21]
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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
