Research No. 4- Who was Vladimir Propp?

Vladimir prop was born in 1895 in St Petersburg , Russian Empire. His studied structuralism and folk tales. He analysed the basic plot components of Russian folk tales to identify their simplest irreducible narrative elements. He extended the Russian formalist approach to the study of the narrative structure. In the Formalist approach, sentence structures were broken down into analyzable elements, or morphemes, and Propp used this method by analogy to analyse Russian fairy tales. By breaking down a large number of Russian folk tales into their smallest narrative units, or narratemes, Propp was able to arrive at a typology of narrative structures.


He also concluded that all the characters could be resolved into 8 broad characyer types in the 100 tales he analysed:

1. The villain- Struggles against the hero
2. The donor- Prepares the hero or gives some magical object
3. The magical helper- helps the hero 
4. The princess or prize- the hero deserves her throughout the story but is unable to marry her because of an unfair evil, usually because of the villain. The hero's journey is often ended when he marries the princess thereby beating the villain.
5. Her father- Gives the task to the hero, identifies the false hero, marries the hero, often sought for during the narrative. Propp noted that functionally, the princess and the father can not be clearly distiguished.
6.  The hero victim/seeker hero- Reacts to the donor, weed the princess.
7. The dispatcher- Character who makes the lack known and sends the hero off.
8. False hero- takes credit for the hero's actions or tries to marry the princess.

An example of this can be found in the music video thriller by Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson in the video is the villain and the girl as the hero victim. 

Another example of this is Taylor swift- Love story