Propp, Tatar, Kieran, Bettelheim

Vladimir Propp

He was born on April 17, 1895 in St. Petersburg where he lived all his life. Vladimir was a Russian philologist and structuralist who analyzed the basic plot components of Russian folktales in order to identify their simplest narrative elements. He was advocated to work with fairy tales for which he achieved world recognition as the first application of structuralism to the humanities and created the bases for new disciplines, such as narratology, semiology and structural anthropology.
Among others, Vladimir Propp was recognized as an inventor of structuralism, which has become a main method of the humanities in twentieth century. He extended the Russian Formalist(1910s-1930s) approach to the study of narrative structure. In the formalist approach sentence structures were broken down into analizable elements(Russian Formalists advocated a "scientific" method for studying poetic language, to the exclusion of traditional psychological and cultural-historical approaches.)
From 1914-1918 Vladimir Propp studied Russian and German philology at Petrograd State University, where he remainded until 1969: as lecturer in the Department of Philology from 1932, as professor from 1938, and then head of departmanent from 1964.
According to Vladimir Proppś research, after the initial situation is depicted, tales take the following sequence of 31 functions: absentation, interdiction, violation of interdiction, reconnaissance, delivery, trickery, complicity, villainy and lack, meditation, beginning counter-action, departure, first function of the donor, hero´s reaction, receipt of a magical agent, guidance, struggle, branding, victory, liquidation return,pursuit, rescue, unrecognized arrival, unfounded claims, difficult task, solution, recognition, exposure, transsfiguration, punishment, wedding.
Propp also concluded that the characters could be resolved into only seven broad character types:
1- the villain - struggles against the hero
2- the donor - prepares the hero or gives him some magical object.
3- The (magical) helper - helps the hero in the quest.
4- The princess an her father - give the task to the hero.
5- The pispatcher - character who makes the lack known and sends the hero off.
6- The hero or victim/seeker hero - reacts to the donor, weds the princess.
7- (false hero) takes credit for the heroś actions or tries to marry the princess.
Also, these roles could sometimes be distributed among various characters.
Conversely, one character could engage in acts as more than one role.

Vladimir Propp is wellknown as the author of four fundamental books about folklore studies and narratology. He wrote morphology of the Folktale (1928), The Historical Roots of Fairy Tales (1946), Russian Heroic Epics (1958) and Russian Agrarian Feast-days (1963) in which he developed the elaboration and aplication of s
tructuralism.


TATAR MARIA M.

Tatar maría m. is wel-respected in the academnic field for her fairy-tale studies and texts as well one of the most published languages and cultures. She chairs the program in folklore and mythology at Havard University, where she teachs courses in German Studies, Folklore and Chilren´s Literature.
Tatar María M. is the author of the Annotated Hans Christian Andersen, Secrets beyond the door: The story of Bluebeard and his Wives; The Annotated Brothers Grimm, The Annotated Classic Fairy-Tales; The Classic Fairy-Tales; The Hard Facts of The Grimms'Fairy-tales, Off with their Heads!; Fairy-Tales and the culture of childhood; Enchanted Hunter: The Power of stories in Childhood.


DR. KIERAN EGAN

He was born in Ireland in 1942. He was brought up and educated in England. After studying History and completed a teaching certificate at Goldmiths College,University of London, He taugh high school for two years. Then, he worked for a year as a Research Fellow at The Institute for Comparative Studies in Kngston-upon-Thames and after that, he moved to The U.S.A. to begin a Ph. D. in Philosophy of education at Stanford University. He worked concurrently as a consultant to the I.B.M. Corp. He completed his study at Cornell University in 1972.
He is the author of about 20 books and coauthor, editor, or coeditor of a few more. He is author of more then one hundred articules. In 1991 he received the Grawemeyer Award in Education.In 1993 He was elected as the first person ineducation the Royal Society of Canada. In 2000 he was elected as a foreign Associate member of the National Academy of Education.In 2001 he Was appointed to a Canada Research Chair in Education, and won a wKillan Research Fellowship. Many books of his own creation have been translated into more than half a dozen European and Asian languages. Recentelly, his books include Teaching as sttory telling, Imagination in teaching and learning, the Educated Mind: How cognitive tools shape our understanding (1997), Children´s Minds, Talking Rabbits and Clockwork Oranges (1999) and Building my Zen Garden (2000). A new book, Getting it Wrong from the Beginning: our progressivit inherance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey and Jean Piaget was published in 2002.
In The Educated Minds, Kieran Egan offers an exciting reframing of the debates corcerning problems of educated and proposes an antidote: increase our understanding of understanding.


Bruno Bettelheim

He was born on August 28, 1903 in Viena, Austria and died on March 13, 1990 in the United States. He was wellkown for his view on austism and emotionally disurbed children. He talked against what he called "refrigarator mother", theory of autism , and his influence was remarkable during the 1960s and 1970s in U.S.A. Bruno Bettelheim was the author of The Uses of Enchantmanent,in which he analyzed fairy tales in terms of Freudian psychology. He firmly believed in the emotional and symbolic importance of fairy tales for children to convey their feelings.Thus, fairy tales are a way of transmitting unconscious role models to children.
According to Bruno Bettelheim, fairy tales have some shared characteristics such as Style, Characters, and Themes.
Taking into account Styles, for instance, faity tales have happy endings, in which good in reward and evil punishment.They tries to compensate for the sad, anxious and paintful feeling of readers as well as create confidence and hope for children. Also, they have a classical opening words "Once Upon a Time" that gives welcome to the readers to an imaginary world. Other characteristic is the repetition of number "three", for example three little pigs, three children in Cinderella including herself, three is the number of the main characters in Little Red Riding Hood. Number "three" depicts perfection and completeness (as the basic unit of a family -father, mother and child)
Taking into account Characters,The Heroes or Heroines have remarkable importance in fairy tales as they symbolize the triumph over difficulties and obstacles in life. Having received this special message, children will be able to strive and overcome any negative aspects in their real lives, like their unconcious models in fairy tales. The Evils, in fairy tales, receive their punishment at the end of the tale in order to satisfy children´s needs for justice. Besides, in fairy tales female figures have all major characters. Fairy tales enhance feminism in society .
Taking into account Themes, fairy tales exert their infuence on society. For instance, in Cinderella "sibling rivalry" depicts a common fact of life that children have to learn to overcome o see them as natural as possible. In the case of Little Red Riding Hood, the theme is that children ought no trust and listen to all sort of people in the outside world, including the gentle ones. This fairy tale has a simple meaning but it a very important one. Thus, fairy tales act as children´s coaches so that they can deal with any problem when they enter society.