세르비아 민담과 한국 민담의 구조와 형식

The Structure and Form of Serbian and Korean Oral Literature

Structuralism is a scholarly methodology for the interpretation of human society and their cultures as well as human languages by logical thinking. This methodology wants to recognize relationships between some factors and the whole, and insists that some partial factors for the making of the object would find meanings when will be consolidated in a frame, so called a ‘structure’. Structuralism is appealing to some critics because it adds a certain objectivity, a scientific objectivity, to the realm of literary studies (which have often been criticized as purely subjective/ impressionistic). This scientific objectivity is achieved by subordinating ‘parole’ to ‘langue’, actual usage is abandoned in favor of studying the structure of a system in the abstract. Thus, structuralist readings ignore the specificity of actual texts and treat them as if they were like the patterns produced by iron filings moved by magnetic force - the result of some impersonal force or power, not the result of human effort. By focusing on the system itself, in a synchronic analysis, structuralists cancel out history. Most insist, as Lévi-Strauss does, that structures are universal, therefore timeless. Structuralists can't account for change or development; they are uninterested, for example, in how literary forms may have changed over time. They are not interested in a text's production or reception/consumption, but in the structures that shape it. In structuralism, the individuality of the text disappears in favor of looking at patterns, systems, and structures. Some structuralists and a related school of critics, so called the Russian Formalists, propose that all narratives can be charted as variations on certain basic universal narrative patterns. The aim of this study is to find similarities and differences in Serbian and Korean folktales from a standpoint of structuralism (by V. Propp and Lévi-Strauss) and the structure of the narrative.