A post on BoingBoing today linked to The Infinite Adventure Machine, an automated story generator using the work of Vladimir Propp, who analyzed Russian Folklore and reduced it to 31 essential elements and 8 character types.

Propp (1895 – 1970) was a Russian Formalist (more here)contemporaneous with Bakhtin (1895 – 1975) who applied Formalist methodology to narrative structure. His work, most especially Morphology of the Folktale (1928) was extremely influential on the development of Structuralism.

For more on Propp, Dmitry Olshansky’s article in the Toronto Slavic Quarterly, “The Birth of Structuralism from the Analysis of Fairy Tales.”

I’ve found a couple simple generators that allow you to play with his ideas, but my favorite web spin-off is the absurd PftML (Proppian fairy tale Markup Language):

<PursuitOfHero subtype=”AttemptToDevourHero”>
The girl ran again. She ran and ran, until she was almost exhausted. The swan-geese saw her again, and began to cackle. They flew in on her, and beat their wings as if at any moment they would snatch her brother from her arms.

The girl ran up to the oven:

“Mother oven, hide me!”
</PursuitOfHero>

 

<RescueOfHero subtype=”RescueFromDevourment”>
“Eat some of my rye buns.”

The girl quickly popped a bun into her mouth and settled herself and her brother into the oven.

The swan-geese flew and flew, called and called, but finally they gave up and flew away, back to the old woman.
</RescueOfHero>

Incidentally, the creators of the Infinite Adventure Machine, Glitch Fiction, have a lot of interesting work. If you’re in Paris between the 12th and 18th, check them out at Design Week.