English

A post about English and English Language Arts tasks and ideas.

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Motifs, Tale Types, Mythemes and More

This post is reblogged from my writing blog, Stefras’ Bridge.

Stefras’ Bridge

Story and poem appreciation or comprehension is a favourite topic of mine. I am a writer after all.

But many people dislike analyzing the stories they read. And story appreciation ignores a whole section of story comprehension that I feel is very fun to analyze and interesting to learn.

Poetry appreciation emphasizes analysis of mechanics. So does story comprehension. But some movement has been made to interpret the meaning of poems and what contributes to that meaning, something I did not learn — or appreciate — until my freshman year in university, that I think is lacking from story analysis.

I curated a resource that addresses this oversight. Here I introduce it.

How does your story work? Can you take elements from it to transform other stories? Can you mix elements to create new immersive experiences?

I love breaking down stories and poems to see how they tick. This probably stems from my elementary and secondary schooling, but a big motivator for me is jubilant curiosity.

Stories have certain tricks and tools they use to help them flow.

Mechanical elements of story and poem: Setting, alliteration, character and more

Mechanically, they have beginnings, middles and ends; rising and falling action; climaxes; conflict; atmosphere; setting; denouements or fifth acts; conflict or struggle; and characters. These instrumental elements parallel the mechanical devices of poems, like lines and stanzas; rhythm and rhyme; and literary devices and figures of speech.

The good folks at Literary Devices unpack these mechanical devices into literary elements (theme, character) and literary techniques (alliteration, personification), which they rightfully apply to prose and poetry.

But there is more to poem and story than mechanical elements. In fact, without meaning there is no story.

Cognitive and emotive components of story and poem: Motif, tale type, function and mytheme

The heart of poetry and story is more intuitive than their mechanics. A poem does not have to have any literary techniques and it can still be a poem. So also can a story.

Every idea, every word has story in it; it would lack meaning and influence otherwise. Stories are built from tinier stories, poems from underlying poetry. It is more than subtext. It is structure and motif and interpretation.

These cognitive and emotive components bring affect and meaning to poem and story. Unpacking story in search of meaning reveals these components.

But what are they?

Unpacking stories by extracting story components

There are two types of cognitive story components: brick-like story chunks and skeleton-like story structures. The story chunks are pieces of story or groups of these pieces that serve as building blocks found across stories. Motifs and tale types represent this type of component.

Motif

A motif is a packet of distinct narrative, a persistent, indivisible and defining detail of story, more than an idea, but less than a complete story in itself. One might equate it to a prompt, a prod that arouses imagination. A motif is specific enough to direct that imagination yet not detailed enough to close a story. Because motif is a component of story, narrative is a better descriptor of it than prompt.

Motifs are units of story meaning. Combining motifs builds story; you can unpack stories into their component motifs. These motifs are different from story elements in that they carry narrative or meaning in them. They also exist across many stories, building stories both similar to and very different from each other.

Stith Thompson studied motifs in folk literature, finding that stories with common and related motifs frequently were related to each other, often being versions of common ancestral stories. Story migration is then possible to map by tracing motif correlations and mutations.

Tale Type

When motifs combine and form self-sufficient groupings or plots that occur in several stories, the stories with these common plots or motif groupings are called tale types. Like motifs, tale types suggest story trees, indicating versions and mutations of story, and their localizations and migrations.

Tracing story origins and evolution through their motifs and tale types can be very entertaining and informative. Many people make careers out of studying these story relationships. Others, like me, use them to unpack stories and inspire new ones.

Unpacking stories by analyzing shared structure and analogies

Motifs and tale types analyze story through its narrative components. They illuminate story relationships and cultural exchange as well as story evolution and origin.

Another way to interpret stories is through their structure. Structure is more closely related to the literary elements than motifs and tale types.

Propp Function

Propp functions are components of plot. They are unpacked by extracting the details of story elements, particularly plot, then analyzing the relationships and order of these details. Propp functions are common, ordered kernels of plot. They are like landmarks most stories pass through.

There are many analyzes of story plot similar to Propp functions, some longer, many shorter. They are all related to what Joseph Campbell calls the Hero’s Journey and what Claude Bremond and Elaine Cancalon dub the network of possibilities (initial situation, actualized event, non-actualized alternative events). What these analyses do is map out how a story unfolds. They unpack the elements of story.

Mytheme

Mythemes are contextual analogies that expose subjective culture-specific meanings. Lévi-Strauss argued that story meaning is culturally subjective: what you read is all in your interpretation. Stories, particularly folktales, enable us to make sense of our world by setting up parallel, yet unreal, situations in the stories. The situations in the stories are usually comparisons, and so are the situations in our world. The function of stories then is to create analogies drawn from the stories to our understanding of our world. These analogies Lévi-Strauss calls mythemes.

Mythemes are structural and subjective components of story. They do not make sense across stories nor across cultures, so they differ from motifs and tale types. They are contextual and dependent on interpretation — you and I read different stories in the same text. Yet, like motifs and tale types, they are built into many stories. They also do not follow an ordered pattern of elemental components, making them different from Propp functions and their ilk. In fact, Lévi-Strauss rejected plot as an important element of story.

To Lévi-Strauss, story models the world to reveal everyday enigmas. Mythemes provide meaning in the story that translates to our experiences and world. In this sense they are cognitive components of story, like motifs, tale types and Propp functions.

A revised curation of motifs, tale types, functions and mythemes

A few years back I curated the 1958 Stith Thompson Motif Index for private research and reference. I used a Russian reference as a base. I since added research into AT and ATU Tale Types, Propp Functions and Lévi-Strauss Mythemes to create a thorough, though hardly exhaustive, study of story, particularly folk literature.

I recently edited and updated that reference and made it responsive to different screen sizes for others to enjoy and use as a resource.

My mirror is now easier to navigate with executive indices and links to the longer, unabridged list. I also cite a few examples of motifs in tales. I also link to sites that hold many examples of AT and ATU tale types, including the Ashliman Collection and the Multilingual Folk Tale Database and to sites that demonstrate Propp function analysis.

My analyses of Propp Functions and Lévi-Strauss Mythemes are more original syntheses of the literature and less curation of others’ work, like my motif and tale type sections.

The reason we study stories and poems

Story comprehension or appreciation is often the least favourite component of language studies. It is easy to understand that readers and listeners would rather listen to and read a story than analyze it. Yet there is a joy in picking the mechanics and concepts of a story out. And there is a function for a writer and teller to do so. Deeper meaning is revealed and more elegant story creation is possible through story unpacking.

From a teaching perspective, I believe the best way to appreciate and comprehend story is by writing story. Place the appreciation in context, give it a purpose and make learning it fun. And don’t forget to include analysis of the cognitive components of story. For writers, story appreciation or comprehension models examples of story creation. And for readers, it can reveal deeper details.

I’d appreciate your thoughts on my updated reference — particularly if you find errors — and your interpretation of motifs, tale types, Propp functions and mythemes.

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Inspiring the Next Generation

I have some interesting news to share.

The Grade 10s in one of the schools where I sub began their poetry unit in English this week. I subbed for them yesterday.

One of their tasks yesterday was to write a poem in one of the forms they had already learned, then share these with the class. There were some very reluctant students; they had a low opinion about this sharing business, particularly their contributive involvement in it.

 

 

I decided to break the ice by sharing one of my poems. And I had access to two: those I published in my writing blog.

The poem I chose to share was Van Gogh and the Moon. It was a hit, particularly when I explained to the kids that the poem was an in promptu (five minute) response to a writing prompt in the local writing club.

So, yes, I got a chance to plug the Write Group as well; I told the kids that students from the school were part of the group, which peeked more interest.

But more importantly, it got each of the students to open up and share some of their poems, not just those they wrote in class yesterday, but those they had access to through their iPhones and other devices.

It was a perfect marriage of teacher and student sharing, technology (I used the Smart board; the students used their devices), and encouragement and modelling by example.

It never ceases to amaze me how well these teachable moments go when the teacher releases control and opens up to her or his students. (Of course, it also never ceases to amaze me how badly such moments go as well at times. There is a definite case for timing and thoughtful and responsive judgement here.)

These students have everything to be proud of. They have incredible imaginations, and a deep and active appreciation for written communication.

Moments like these remind me how much I love teaching, and learning with, these students.

This article is cross-posted in Digital Substitute and Stefras’ Bridge.

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Thinking… Please Wait

 

Hi. It has been a month since I last posted, but I accomplished a lot during that time. And I am very happy I did. I feel like I progressed quite a bit since I last posted.

This is great since I experienced debilitating writer’s block with some of the key posts I have been struggling to publish, and this pretty much stalled me. It happens I guess. I had all these things I wanted to do and I wasn’t advancing.

Thank goodness I had another blog and other professional resources to work on.

Last month I took a rest from Digital Substitute so I could catch up on some much neglected projects that I was just raring to work on. In one of my early posts, Math Lab: Revisiting Technology and Imagination, I exclaimed how liberating it was to take a single day off from blogging, tweeting, PD and other professional activities to just play, and I think the post that resulted was one of my favourites to write, and perhaps my second most popular.

I find most of my posts, and certainly my best ones, result from some emotional or playful encounter. So, I consider the sacrifice of one month worthwhile to recharge myself.

Wandering in the Land of Set-aside

So last month I worked on several fronts.

Teaching Resources

I editted my Teaching Resources site, including adding:

  1. notes I wrote, and links to online archives, from several of my recent PD sessions to my Professional Development Index,
  2. resources, and a Slideshare Pak Liam created in response to these pages, to my Green Pea Analogy pages,
  3. focussing questions and points to my Phronesis page, and
  4. a math term etymology document that apparently was very well received given the tweets and requests for links to it on Twitter.

Writing in Play

I also did a lot of writing this month, something that has sadly been long waiting, including the completion of a short story based on a Figment Theme Prompt and working on a chapter in one of my long stories. I participated in Figment Theme Prompts, doing a little writing each day. And I posted to my Stefras’ Bridge blog. Altogether, a great month of accomplishment for my writing.

Stefras’ Bridge

I blogged about another of my hobbies, oil painting, and linked to one of my essays describing the history and folklore behind the earliest form of Mardi Gras. And I posted my first review and interview — with Malyn Mawby.

The Write Group

I also created a new Twitter account for the Write Group, to which I am migrating my English and writing tweeps and adding tweeps specifically for the Write Group. And I continued to work on our wiki, gathering RSS feeds and bookmarks relevant to our group. It doesn’t look like much now, but wait until I get things up and running!

Flickr, Videos and Coding

Finally, I added some photos to my Flickr photostream, I am working on two cartoon videos for Pi Day — there has got to be a better way to do this than drawing all these pictures … but boy does it look neat (for my first true “movie” videos) — and I am refreshing my coding skills with Code Year.

 

How did I get so busy?

I think I work in there somewhere.

Thinking … please wait.

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Our Children’s Gears: Do You Like Dinosaurs?

Do you like dinosaurs?

Or did you when you were a kid?

 

 

Dinosaurs are neat. They are big, ferocious and were, quite frankly, very successful. They were also the dominant animals of the Mesozoic, for 180 million years. That is impressive.

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I never liked dinosaurs when I was a kid. I found them boring.

I was beguiled by the Palaeozoic and early Cenozoic rather than the Mesozoic. The creatures — plants and animals — that lived then were alien, intriguing and awesome.

I could never put my finger on why trilobites and Paraceratherium interested me more than dinosaurs. But there was a pattern in that interest that cropped up elsewhere in my life.

An underlying ecology

When it came time for me to enter university, I knew exactly what I wanted to be — an ecologist. Not a botanist, not a zoologist, not even a geologist, an ecologist. Don’t get me wrong, I was fascinated in zoology, botany and geology, mostly botany, but I did not want to study one thing.

I was interested in it all. I was interested in how it all fit and worked together. I was interested in how life lived on an erratic Earth. Its individual forms fascinate, but mostly as pieces of the intricate whole.

And that, as I later found out, was why I didn’t like dinosaurs. They ate. They fought. They terrorized the land — not to mention other animals. But, until the last ten to twenty years, for me they never belonged — neither fit nor worked — within a bigger system.

They were boring.

In the last decade or two, that changed, or perhaps I became aware of the “bigger” Mesozoic picture. More Mesozoic palaeoecology has been learned and integrated into other disciplines, as illustrated in Harold Levin‘s The Earth Through Time (I have the 2003 seventh edition published by John Wiley and Sons). And now the dinosaurs belong with, influence and are influenced by a bigger lifescape and ecology. Dinosaurs became more and more interesting as they began to fit and work in the puzzle of life and living in a changing, furious Earth.

 

 

It is their place in ecology that fascinates me, not their ferociousness nor their reputation.

The point? Even as a child, I was geared toward ecology.

An overarching Universe

 

 

My enjoyment of astronomy also stems from the same root. I am fascinated by the Earth’s place and development in the Solar System, and of the Solar System’s place and development in the Universe.

I look at a star as I do a handful of sand and I wonder about its past, about its surroundings, its environment, its present and its future. I wonder about what it interacted — or will interact — with, what it influences or what it is influenced by. I similarly wonder (to the same depth) about the Universe that the star represents and the Earth and rock that the sand typifies.

I remember encountering an ant crawling on a moss and seeing its ecology and the ecology of the ecosystem where it lived. I had no words for these concepts, but I distinctly remember seeing the ant interacting with its environment. I barely noticed the ant outside of this frame. I was in grade two. And I still see ants and stars and handfuls of sand this way.

 

 

A far-sweeping magic

Story exists in this way too. With story we build our cultures, societies, histories, skills and technologies. But we also build our spirit and curiosity.

Story exists in a bigger context, constructed of reality and imagination and wonder.

Arthur C. Clarke coined, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. I prefer to replace “advanced” with “exotic”, meaning unfamiliar or novel or not (currently) understood.

Ants and sand and stars, ecology and math and story and language are magic. There is always more of them to explore.

Story is a form of species-changing magic. And writing transmits this magic into the minds of generations and far-flung peoples.

In writing fantasy (which I mostly do), one creates the rules of a given world and studies how a story fits and works within that world. It is intriguing to witness story unfold even as one writes it. I am always surprised by what story reveals, about what it says about the world it explores, influences, interacts with and is influenced by.

 

 

Story is a key part of my life and has been for as long as I can remember. I am geared toward it like I am ecology and astronomy.

The gears of our children

In his essay forward, The Gears of My Childhood, to his 1980 book Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas, Seymour Papert eloquently describes how gears shaped how he perceived the world and approached learning when he was a child.

We all have our gears where what we learn ceases to be flat and static and becomes multidimensional and living. Papert describes vividly how gears of different sizes fit together to produce meshing products in a multiplication table. I tried to describe here how interactions are part of my guiding gears. I have students who are ranchers. Others are athletes, artists, scientists, writers. And of course they are each interested in more than one thing and are geared toward truly fundamental world views.

 

 

Imagine viewing multiplication as representation of meshing gears. What most affects us, influences our world view and shapes how we perceive and interpret what we later encounter has a great effect and affect on what we learn and how we do it.

Teaching toward our children’s gears might help them understand and learn what we are teaching. It also might allow them to more easily own what they learn, extend it beyond our teaching and keep it for a lifetime. Teaching the student more than the students and the lesson content facilitates her engagement with and conceptualization of the outcomes we wish him to learn.

Papert recounts his discovery that others do not share his world model of the gears, but have different models instead. We have to teach students we know in multiple ways to help them learn what we want them to learn. We have to know and value our students to help them realize their influence, their potential and their dreams.

We might have a class under our charge, but that class consists of unique individuals geared by unique world models. The function and art of teaching is to change behaviour not people. Our gears are as precious as our names. Sometimes all we own are these two things. We need to be careful to nurture and engage our children’s gears so that they might serve our children well in our multi-layered societies.

 

 

This post was inspired by David Wees’ draft of a keynote he was invited to present at the 2012 University of Alberta Faculty of Education Technology Fair.

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Revisiting Four Themes

UPDATE: Due to Twitter’s buying and shutting down of Posterous, Malyn’s 10minutes sketchbook blog has been moved to WordPress, The Sketchbook Project 2012 – 10 minutes. Please visit the new site, enjoy Malyn’s sketchbook and sign her guestbook.

Deep passions never die

Last night I had an incredible Twitter conversation with Malyn Mawby about her Playing in Public sketch featured in my last post.

I asked her, since she is part of a sketch tour, whether she was just newly learning how to sketch or if she had started when she was younger. She proudly confessed the latter, and you can tell from the quality of her sketching.

Malyn also mentioned that she had stopped sketching for several years a little while back. For her, the Art House Co-op Sketchbook Project was an opportunity to revisit her sketching and renew her passion for artistic play.

This led to discussion of my passion for creative writing, which I also have enjoyed since childhood and also took a hiatus of several years from.

Hiatuses lead to inspiration

Of course, Malyn asked why I stopped. And I explained my heart transplant to her.

This led Malyn to draw a new sketch … about me.

And here it is. Wow!

 

 

For the colourful story behind this sketch, please read Malyn’s post about this sketch.

Camaraderie expands horizons

I developed many friendships using Twitter. I use the term PLN often, because most of my friends are teachers and most of our communication is professional. But it would undervalue my activity on Twitter and other social media, like this blog, to dismiss the camaraderie developed in my learning journey. My social and professional circles have definitely expanded since I started developing professionally online.

Resparking passion

In addition, I have another blog, maintained much less often than this one, which I dedicate to writing and my writing in particular. This is where I occasionally write about writing.

Last month, I became the new leader of the Write Group. This role is rather daunting, since I am replacing the quill of a great leader who served for 29 years. I expect that as my new duty takes hold, I will post more to my writing blog, particularly since I am designing a resource wiki for the Write Group.

I will also do more writing with the encouragement of my duties, much like Malyn is sketching more with the encouragement of her participation in the Art House Co-op Sketchbook Project.

So from a conversation last night, I have expanded my horizons some more and so has Malyn. Now that is social networking in action.

How about you? What is your passion? And how do you encourage yourself to expand and never lose it?

This post is cross-posted in my writing blog.

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Bait Them With Suspense

To begin, happy Thanksgiving to those of you who read my blog and live in Canada. I hope you are doing well and having a great day.

 

 

Autumn has always been my favourite season. Along with Christmas, Halloween is my favorite Holiday. Thanksgiving is my next. I think this is because these Holidays remind me of the change of seasons, the metamorphosis from one form of nature to another, when change itself portends something new, something unknown. It is this portent, this suspense, that hooks students and maintains their attention.

Suspense is the desire to know what is next or what something unknown is. It is very different from what was that and what just happened. Suspense is not confusion; it is curiosity awakened and denied, like a bulging pouch dangled on a stick.

In addition to portending change and suspense, Thanksgiving, Halloween and Christmas seem to be the Holidays when we most clearly recognize and celebrate nature. I always liked natural mysteries, particularly when they are related to phenomena that have been explained.

Take this Astronomy Picture of the Day that seems to show an ocean on fire. But is it?

Actually, it is a sunrise over the Rio de La Plata. Imagine if you would introducing this photograph in your Science or Language Arts class and discussing it before explaining what it is about, then discussing the explanation and how the two descriptions differ and why.

 

 

I have often been fascinated by the phenomena of mysterious natural lights, and Autumn seems to fire this fascination. Many of these lights have been explained; many have not. Folklore, contemporary, ancient and in between, magnifies these phenomena making for great language arts stories and controversial, if not messy and notorious, scientific investigations. But what fun kids can have studying these edgy subjects and learning the nature of language arts and scientific inquiry.

Mysterious Weather Phenomena

 

St. Elmo’s Fire (explained and verified)

 

 

Will-o’-the-Wisp (unexplained and unconfirmed)

 

 

Newton studied the Will-o’-the-Wisp, as did several other famous and respected investigators. Several authors and poets have used it as a motif. For instance, I wrote an analysis comparing Brook’s King of the Silver River, Tolkien’s Tom Bombadil and Tolkien’s Tinfang Warble to the Will o’ the Wisp phenomenon.

Want to get your students interested about nature? Start by teaching them what we do not know and understand, then what we have come to know and understand, and finally what we have studied thoroughly. Natural phenomena offer a mystery, an authentic element of suspense, that stirs almost all curiosity.