We've already had a sneak peak at those lusty nuns and abbots in The Decameron, Boccaccio's 14th century book made up of 100 mini-stories. It's an Italian medieval classic and structuralists think it's to die for—though maybe not as much as the plague-sufferers did at the time when it was written.
Some questions for you:
(1) We've looked at a couple of mini-stories from The Decameron in the Analysis section. Now, go back and look at more stories. Do you find that the same patterns/structures that Todorov pointed to in his analysis hold for other stories in the book?
(2) Todorov's analysis of The Decameron looks, specifically, at plot structure in the stories. But there are other aspects of narrative that we can also try to analyze from a structuralist perspective. Can you find other common elements in these stories? How do the different stories treat setting or character, for example, and can we find patterns there as well?