A Structuralist Study On Er Pai

The First and Second Collections of Shocking Stories, written by Ling Mengchu(1580—1644), a scholar in late Ming Dynasty, comprising of 78 stories in total and contain one foreword and one text for each on the whole, are short, vernacular novel collections in the style of script for telling-story, which. Compared with Feng Menglong's San Yan or Three Collections of Stories,the original components in Er Pai are much more than the former. Therefore, it is said that San Yan is a compiled work, while Er Pai presents much composing strenth. Because of the essense of writing and comsumption of popular literature, as well as following the interests of the common people at the time, Er Pai is a kind of popular literature, which the personal elements of the author in the story-telling novels are greatly lessened compared with popular literature.Therefore, there aren't few up-to-day topics reflecting the characteristics of Ming Dynasty in Er Pai, many plot prototypes and original stories, however, were collected from folklore tales and historical anecdotes, which means plot units and story outlines reoccur numerously. With scientic approaches of parataxis and statistics, the characteristics and patterns of the work will be better illustrated.One of the major targets of structuralism is to research the literature scientifically, which advocates arguing the constructive principle of literary works and puts forward the concept of"function"so as to associate a certain work witn elements that can be disintegrated. Scholars in this field research the functions of some certain means or constructive principles in literary works to figure out how these things make the works as a systematic whole. Structuralist focus on the procedure of discovery, requiring certain distance between the critics and the works; thus it is to creating meanings of the texts instead of making passive interpretation. Meanwhile, Structuralism also holds that submerging structure characterizes the law of linkage among things, so that the senses should be revealed and parataxised through scientic approaches. It encourages panoramic outlook, investigates deep structures via superficial presentation of literary texts, and generates meaning through systematic analyses. It is aknowledged that"the ingeniousness of applying structuralism and of analyzing literature with it consists in elaboration."This thesis consists of introduction, four chapters and conclusison. The First Chapter introduces the theory basis governing the whole thesis, which reconstructs the narrative function of"Er Pai"stories by refering to V. Propp's Morphological Study of Folktale and Edian Souriau's Dramatic Function, thus the breakthrough point of the textual analysis forms and the meaning generation mechnism shapes. Chapter Two underlies the thesis in analysis which explores"Er Pai", the nucleus subject in the literary system by the means of Binary Opposition theory of Levi.Strauss. Chapter Three refines the analysis of the thesis, closely analyzing several nucleus codes in Er Pai with L. J. Greimas'Semantics Rectangle. The fourth Chapter, naturally, intensifies the analysis by interpreting several classic stories in Er Pai with Todorov's Narrative Grammar and Grammatical Structure theories, to decode the behavior patterns and the characters'inner inquisition. All in all, this thesis concerns and penetrates the deep structures and value pursuance of Er Pai through overbearing and multistoried persectives, and hoping to experience the dynamism and profundness of structuralism while analyzing.