Critical Approaches to Literature

Structuralism

1. Underlying patterns

2. Characters and actions: all folk and fairy tales are based on 31 fixed elements.

3. Defamiliarization and estrangement

4. Horizontal and vertical reading: syntagmatic and paradigmatic

5. Mythemes: how they are combined, especially as binary opposites

6. Binary oppositions: fractions, top half is valued over the bottom half, good/evil

7. Roland Barthe’s 5 Codes of Fiction: action, puzzles, cultural, connotative, symbolic

Why does Goodman Brown go to the forest?

Why does Faith try to stop him?

How was rendezvous with the mysterious man made?

How does he resemble Brown’s ancestors?

Dream or real event?

Horizontal read:

Goodman Brown leaves home and enters the forest

The encounter with the man is a lexie

Vertical read:

Men forsaking their homes and loving wives for dark ends

Satanic congregation resembles devil worship

Lost innocence