Application of Greimas’ Actant Model to a Poem Example: Goethe Erlkönig

The world is made up of systems of signs and a sign consists of 2 sides: content and expression. The structuralists have been particularly concerned with the expression side of sign, and its content side has not been dealt with as much. But the two sides of sign are closely related to each other. The actantial model, developed by Greimas, helps in this point because in this model the meaning of the figures is in the foreground. The aim of this study is to determine how the actantial model developed by Greimas works in a poem. The poem that was selected for analysis is “Erlkönig” by Goethe. Usually, no event is told in poems. But in this poem, something is told, because it is a ballad, namely a narrative poem. This fact simplifies the analysis process. Thereby relationships between elements of the text are reconstructed. With this aim, the actantial model by A. J. Greimas is presented later and the connections between elements of the poem will be determined in order to analyze the poem according to this model.

Cite this article as: İmrağ, Ö. S. (2022). Application of Greimas’ Actant Model to a Poem Example: Goethe Erlkönig. Journal of Literature and Humanities, 69, 100-107.