Research project Literary motivation – or how do you construct a story?
The project examines how a story progresses based on different motivations and how the composition produces effects of different kinds.
Hans Färnlöf is doing research on the structure of stories. The project examines how a story progresses based on different motivations and how the composition produces effects of different kinds.
Project description
Literary motivation is a concept coined by the Russian Formalists (1915-1930), who called it motivirovka. They approach the narrative text on two main levels: at the one hand, they analyse the story itself (fabula); at the other, they examine how the story is presented through its composition (syuzhet). The main idea is that what happens in the story is fundamentally determined by – and seen through – the author's narrative strategy. Let's say that a fictional character hesitates before committing a decisive act. On the story level (fabula), this can be explained, for example, on psychological (the character is unsure) or purely factual (the character does not have the opportunity to carry out the action) grounds. The Russian Formalists would then say that these circumstances are introduced by the author in order to create tension through his way of telling (syuzhet). These levels are of course separate: the character does not hesitate in order to create any tension for the reader.
In the study of literary motivation – which does not necessarily mean that someone feels “motivated”, but describes how different narrative elements move the story forward – one can focus on the causality and circumstances that lie behind the actual course of events that are presented in the fictional world. These can be linked to external factors (e.g. be genre-specific or refer to social conditions) but also be built up internally in the story (e.g. if a character showing certain traits that he then repeats). One can also look more closely at the effects that are created. What is motivated, i.e. “justified”, moves the story forward, but can also aim to create artistic effects or emphasize the themes of the work. Literary motivation therefore constitutes an analytical model that permits us to see how a story is structured and place the narrative poetics in relevant contexts.
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Hans Färnlöf
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