Tehran Hopkins Club

Vladimir Propp was contemporaneous to the Russian Formalists and wrote in the beginning of twentieth century when the desire to analyze the whole world on the bases of empiricist scientific approach was dominant. That is why in his discourse, in his famous work on Russian folkloric tales, which is often righteously considered as one of the forefathers of structuralism, he discusses literature as an object open to scientific and empirical analysis and investigation. That is why he speaks of the common theme or structural functions of the Russian fairy tales as the basic morphology of the Russian folkloric stories. He believes that such stories have two major elements: a. dramatic persona and b. functions. Reading such stories structualistically, he comes to the conclusion that even though the dramatic personae of such works are vastly different, their basic fictional functions are quite the same and thus we can recompose and reformulate those fictional functions in order to arrive at the most fundamental and basic common structure of all stories, that is the morphology that is underlying and common among all the actual and possible folkloric stories or fairy tales.