A Study on the Application of Myth Structures for Structural Storytelling

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to suggest a storytelling structure applicable to storytelling education and actual planning and creation as a researcher of oral literature in this age of story industry. What needs to be focused on to figure out that possibility is myth’s narrative structure. Myth guarantees sensitivity from people as it contains archetypical images, the universal basis of humans’ unconsciousness, richly and also reflects the universal processes of human life in terms of its narrative structure, too. Therefore, this study is going to find out the principles of structural storytelling that can reflect myth’s universality and sensitivity entirely from myth’s structure. As a matter of fact, it is not totally new to figure out storytelling principle grounded on myth’s structure. The monomyth structure developed by ‘Campbell-Vogler’ is already widely used as the general principle of storytelling. But the problem is that as the prevalent ‘Campbell-Vogler’ model is abused schematically and currently losing its original function. Accordingly, this author sees that it is needed to devise measures to secure its mythical function entirely in the aspects of its structure. What needs to be focused on here is the narrative structure of ‘self-discovery-overcoming’ which forms the gist of Korean shamanic myths. The structure focuses on how the main character of a myth overcome his or her own limitations through mental experience and gets to accomplish completeness. It is a structure to tell how those encountering the narrative of the myth’s main character come to agree on that and internalize that narrative experience. Putting that ‘self-discovery-overcoming’ structure along with the monomyth structure of ‘Campbell-Vogler’, it would be possible to draw a storytelling structure that can fully secure the universality and sensitivity of a myth. It will be needed to verify if the structure suggested here would turn out to be valid enough, and this researcher will conduct close examination on that afterwards as a follow-up task.