Nils Holgersson’s Wonderful Journey through the Mythemes of Sweden. Using Computational Methods to Explore Selma Lagerlöf’s Narrative Geographies for Everyone
Résumé
The article explores the main structuring elements of the national mythology of Sweden as promoted in Selma Lagerlöf’s Wonderful Journey through Sweden (1906/07), understood as mythemes of social knowledge. After a perhaps too short discussion of the main theoretical and methodological choices, including the concept of mytheme and homo narrans in the context of general narratology and media change, the article proceeds in the discussion of the results obtained by a computational method developed by Ludovic Stappazzon and the author. 196 common mythemes are mapped as a network of units representing the probability of co-occurrence in the narrative. Most Central Chronotope mythemes are Forest, Way, Water, Farm, Land and Lake, which are until today main elements of a national imaginative geography. Action mythemes relate to the idea of education, related in turn to the concept of family. Human and non-human actors and chronotopes are clearly divided as two spheres in the narrative grammar, underlining the nature-culture-divide central to the narration.
Origine | Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s) |
---|