Verbal Art and the Structuralist Synthesis

Pierre and Elli Maranda’s Structural Analysis of Oral Tradition, containing elicited papers from a distinguished group of scholars, offers an overview of the uses of the structural method in folkloristic anthropology. These papers provide the basis for a more general discussion of two major issues. One is the divergent approaches of two key figures, Levi-Strauss and Propp. One way of characterizing their difference is by contrasting how Levi-Strauss and Greimas, building upon Propp, use the term armature, and the closely related terms code and message. The other major issue deals with the distinction between the anthropological and the literary approach to folklore analysis. The former implies a concern for the relation between folklore and other aspects of culture, including the communicative context in which texts occur. The latter. implies an exclusive interest in the text itself. In point of fact, the structural approach cuts across both literary and anthropological folkloristics. Furthermore, from a structuralist perspective the difference in substance, oral vs written, is irrelevant. The structural analysis of folklore should be of interest to the literary scholar.