Structuralism

How Do We Choose What Media to Consume?

Decision-making factors:
- Recommendations (friends, reviews)
- Personal preferences (actors, directors)
- Marketing (trailers, posters, titles)
- Impulse decisions (cinema visits, group preferences)
Why choices matter:
- Reflect our identity and preferences.
- Influence our expectations of media content.

Media relies on recurring elements:
- Familiar genres, characters, and storylines.
- Consistency helps meet audience expectations (e.g., James Bond = action, gadgets).
Structuralism in storytelling:
- Focuses on patterns and structures in narratives.
- Recurring themes: love, conflict, resolutions (e.g., soap operas)

What is Structuralism?
- Study of underlying structures in narratives across cultures and time.
- Originated in linguistics (Saussure, Lévi-Strauss).
- Applied to media through recurring storytelling “grammar.”
Why it matters:
- Patterns limit innovation (e.g., stereotypes, fixed gender roles).
- Reflect and reinforce societal norms and inequalities (gender, race, class).

Benefits of structuralism:
- Explains why certain stories resonate universally.
- Helps predict audience preferences and reactions.
Critiques and challenges:
- Normalizes stereotypes and social inequalities.
- Limits narrative diversity and creativity.
Broader impact:
- Insights into media’s role in shaping culture and ideology.

Who is Todorov?
- Bulgarian philosopher specializing in literary theory, culture, and history.
- Key works: The Poetics of Prose (1977), The Conquest of America (1999), Hope and Memory (2003).
Key Concepts:
- Focus on genres and their evolution.
- Analysis of the “uncanny” in narratives.
- Emphasis on “repetition and difference” in genre (Neale, 1980).
- Genres evolve by adopting and resisting conventions (Duff, 2000).

Role of Genre:
- Organizes media into recognizable categories (e.g., romantic comedy vs. sci-fi).
- Creates expectations that guide audience understanding and consumption.
Structuralism and Genre Analysis:
- Highlights recurring forms and events across media.
- Genres as systems that evolve to reflect societal and cultural processes.
Challenges:
- Genre boundaries are fluid and subjective.
- Translation issues highlight communication as a social and cultural process.

Narratives rely on ideas of cause and effect, which are usually presented in that order. A random set of events does not make a narrative; there must be some way in which events are linked, responding to one another.
If you think about the times you have been confused by a film, because characters act strangely, or things happen which cannot be explained, you will realise that your confusion is a result of an expectation that stories should be logical, motivated by cause and effect.

Todorov notes his analysis is not new, and places it in the context of Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (1968 [1928]). Propp analysed hundreds of Russian fairy tales that had been handed down through generations, and found that they all had the same basic narrative structure and main characters.
It can be seen that this is useful evidence for structuralists, who argue that there are underlying structures within all forms of communication. Propp’s work is central to structuralism, even though it took some thirty years for it to be translated into English.
His structures can be applied to the majority of mainstream texts today, such as Hollywood films, soap operas, and the ways in which news is reported. Note that, the word ‘function’ is used here in a specific way, which Todorov defines to ensure we understand what is meant by it.

(1) the opening situation of equilibrium; (2) the degradation of the situation through an event, a crisis; (3) the search for and recovery, (4) obstacles and (5) the reestablishment of the equilibrium
Todorov modifies Propp: Indeed, if Propp’s analysis did not exist, Todorov would not have been able to do his. This shows how theory often draws on existing theory, and that theorising is an ongoing process dependent on the interplay of various writers and thinkers
Alain Robbe-Grillet: alternative to traditional ways of constructing narratives, usually by refusing to adopt sequences of cause and effect, and playing about with the chronology of stories.
Because we are used to reading stories in such a way, however, it is inevitable that most readers will attempt to construct a traditional story from his novels, because it is how we are used to making sense of things. Todorov acknowledges this, but notes we are aware of the difficulty of this process, and that Robbe-Grillet’s novels do not feel ‘typical’

There are lots of films, books, and other stories in which predictions come true, and the narrative relies on us knowing a certain future is predicted or warning is given. The whole of The Lord of the Rings (dir. Jackson, 2001–3) series works in this way; can you think of others?
Todorov argues that a story’s interest doesn’t lie in wondering what is going to happen next. But when you see most romantic comedies you know the couple will get together at the end, just as you know 007 will defeat the villain in any James Bond film. Such stories are interesting not because of what happens, but because of how it happens. What other examples of this can you think of?
This idea of wanting and fleeing can be seen in a host of narratives. Can you think of examples of such stories happening in soap operas? What about sitcoms?