Story Features: An Overview

The Thompson motifs and the ATU tale types are helpful in doing research for this project, but only up to a point. For all kinds of reasons (which I might try to explain a separate post later on), the motifs and tale types are not adequate to my goals for this project:

1. to describe the stories in terms of specific features so that we can see which stories share which features, and also so that we can see what makes a given story distinctive;

2. to explain these features as storytelling styles that storytellers can use in order to create new stories.

So, I will now beginning to do my own analysis of the features of these stories, and I'll use this post as an index page that will lead to the posts where I developing those features and the stories that exemplify those features.

As a first pass, I will be sorting all the stories into 5 categories; the links below go to the Diigo listings which in turn will bring you back to this blog:

Cumulative Chains	Cumulative Series
Other Chains	Other Series
Other Repetition

As you can see, I'm looking to see whether stories are told in a cumulative style or not, and then I'm also looking to see whether a story features a chain or a series (plus some other kinds of repetition I am interested in).

The distinction between a chain and a series is one that I need to work on, and perhaps I can find better terminology. This will do for a start! By chain I mean a sequence in which the actors or actions are interconnected in ways defined by the story itself, while by a series I mean something more like a list -- that is, either the items in the series are not strongly connected or they are connected in a predefined sequence (numbers, letters of the alphabet, etc.).