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Constructing Social Myths in the Modern Mass Literature (the Narrative Analysis of the Female American Novel)
The paper problematizes the literary text that becomes a subject of the sociological analysis when representing social processes and phenomena as well as social practices of certain groups. The narrative analysis reveals a deep structure of the text reflecting values, norms and social attitudes used for describing social groups and social processes. The analysis correlates with structural hermeneutics of G. Alexander implying sociocultural research of semantic structures of the modern mass literature where social myths and archetypes are updated, serving as interpretive models to explain and organize (construct) the social world.
The paper aims to show the results of the empirical research while proposing an original method of the narrative analysis of 18 American female novels, top rated in the largest specialized websites. The method synthesizes various courses in narrative analysis (event-structure analysis by D. Heise and L. Griffin), structural approach (R. Barthes, V. Propp, T. van Dijk) and K.Yung's theory. It consists in constructing a causal sequence of narrative events interpreting it in the context of the social myth. The method’s steps include:
- studying the life course of the heroines;
- selecting significant events (based on structural indicators);
- narrativization of the chosen events using the grammatical approach (verbs as action highlighters);
- forming causal sequence of the events;
- detecting the general narrative structure interpreted in the context of the social myth.
The resulting narrative schemes form 3 basic archetypical female role-models within the cosmogonist myth and can be considered as interpretive patterns for describing gender roles transformation in modern American society. The results of this empirical research can be verified in the context of feminist and post-feminist theories.