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Storytelling

is the conveying of events in words,images, andsoundsoften by improvisationor embellishment. Stories or narrativeshave been shared in every culture and in every land as a means of entertainment, education, preservation of culture and in order to instillmoralvalues. Crucial elements of stories and storytelling include plotandcharacters, as well as thenarrative point of view. The earliest forms of storytelling are thought to have been primarily oral combinedwith gestures and expressions.Rudimentary drawings scratched onto the walls of cavesmay be forms of early storytelling for many of the ancient cultures. TheAustralian Aborginal people painted symbols from the stories on cave walls as ameans of helping the storyteller remember the story. The story was then told using acombination of oral narrative, music,rock artand dance. Ephemeral media such assand, leaves, and the carved trunks of living trees have also been used to record storiesin pictures or with writing.The evolution of technology has changed the tools available to storytellers. With theadvent of writing, the use of actual digit symbols to represent language, and the use of stable, portable media stories were recorded, transcribed and shared over wide regionsof the world. Stories have been carved, scratched, painted, printed, or inked ontowood or bamboo, ivory and other bones, pottery, clay tablets, stone, palm-leaf books,skins (parchment), bark cloth, paper , silk, canvasand other textiles, recorded onfilm and stored electronically in digital form. Complex forms of tattooing may alsorepresent stories, with information about genealogy, affiliation and social status.Traditionally, oral stories were committed to memory and then passed fromgeneration to generation. However, in the most recent past, written and televisedmedia has largely surpassed this method communicating local, family and culturalhistories.

Oral traditions

Albert Bates Lordexamined oral narratives (see alsooral storytelling) from field transcripts of Yugoslav oral bards collected by Milman Parry in the 1930s, and thetexts of epics such asThe Odyssey and Beowulf .

[1]

Lord found that a large part of thestories consisted of text improvised during the telling process.Lord identified two types of story

vocabulary.

The first he called 'formulas': "rosy-fingered dawn," "the wine-dark sea," certainset phraseshad long been known of inHomer and other oral epics. But no one realized before Lord how common theseformulas were. He discovered that across many story traditions that fully 90% of anoral epic is assembled from lines repeated verbatim or with one-for-one wordsubstitutions. Oral stories are built out of phrases stockpiled from a lifetime of hearingand telling stories.The other type of story vocabulary is theme. A theme is a set sequence of storyactions that structure the tale. Just as the teller of tales proceeds line-by-line usingformulas, so he proceeds from event-to-event using themes. One almostuniversaltheme is repetition, as evidenced in Western folklore with the 'rule of three': three brothers set out, three attempts are made, three riddles are asked. A theme can be as

simple as a specific set sequence describing the arming of ahero, starting with shirtand trousers and ending with headdress and weapons. A theme can be large enough to be a plot component. For example: a hero proposes a journey to a dangerous place / hedisguises himself / his disguise fools everybody / except for a common person of littleaccount (a crone, a tavern maid or a woodcutter) / who immediately recognizes him / the commoner becomes the hero's ally, showing unexpected resources of skill or initiative. A theme does not belong to a specific story, but may be found with minor variation in many different stories. Themes may be no more than handy prefabricated parts for constructing a tale. Or they may represent universal truths - ritual-based,religious truths asJames Frazer saw in

The Golden Bough

, or archetypal, psychological truths asJoseph Campbelldescribes in

The Hero With a Thousand Faces

.The story was described byReynolds Price,when he wrote: A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens--second innecessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survivewithout love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly tonarrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the smallaccounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths."

[2]

Folklorists sometimes divide oral tales into two main groups: "Märchen" and "Sagen".These areGermanterms for which there are no exactEnglishequivalents; the first one is both singular and plural."Märchen," loosely translated as "fairy tale(s)" (though fairies are rare in them) take place in a kind of separate "once-upon-a-time" world of nowhere-in-particular. Theyare clearly not intended to be understood as true. The stories are full of clearly definedincidents, and peopled by rather flat characters with little or no interior life. When thesupernatural occurs, it is presented matter-of-factly, without surprise. Indeed, there isvery little affect, generally; bloodcurdling events may take place, but with little callfor emotional response from the listener."Sagen," best translated as "legends," are supposed to have actually happened, veryoften at a particular time and place, and they draw much of their power from this fact.When the supernatural intrudes (as it often does), it does so in an emotionally fraughtmanner. Ghost and lover's leap stories belong in this category, as do many UFO-stories, and stories of supernatural beings and events. .Another extremely important examination of orality in human life is Walter J. Ong's

Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word

(1982). Ong studies thedistinguishing characteristics of oral traditions, and how oral and written culturesinteract and condition one another, and ultimately influence human epistemology.

Storytelling as art form

Storytelling aesthetics

The art of narrative is by definition a highly aesthetic enterprise, and there are anumber of aesthetic elements that typically interact in well-developed stories. Suchelements include the essential idea of narrative structure, with identifiable beginnings,middles and ends or exposition-development-climax-resolution-denouement,normally constructed into coherent plot lines; a strong focus on temporality thatincludes retention of the past, attention to present action, and protention/futureanticipation; a substantial focus on characters and characterization which is “arguablythe most important single component of the novel” (David Lodge

The Art of Fiction

67); a given hetergloss of different voices dialogically at play—“the sound of thehuman voice, or many voices, speaking in a variety of accents, rhythms and registers”(Lodge

The Art of Fiction

97); possesses a narrator or narrator-like voice, which bydefinition “addresses” and “interacts with” reading audiences (seeReader Response theory); communicates with aWayne Booth-esque rhetorical thrust, a dialectic process of interpretation, which is at times beneath the surface, conditioning a plottednarrative, and other at other times much more visible, “arguing” for and againstvarious positions; relies substantially on now-standard aesthetic figuration, particularly including the use of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony (seeHayden White,

Metahistory

for expansion of this idea); is often enmeshed inintertextuality, with copious connections, references, allusions, similarities, parallels,etc. to other literatures; and commonly demonstrates an effort toward

bildingsroman

,a description of identity development with an effort to evince

becoming

in character and community.

Storytelling activities

Storytelling Festivals feature the work of several storytellers. Elements of the oral storytellingart form includevisualization(the seeing of images in the mind's eye), and vocal and bodilygestures. In many ways, the art of storytelling draws upon other art forms such as acting,oral interpretation, and performance studies. Several storytelling organizations started in the US during the 1970s. NationalAssociation for the Perpetuation and Preservation of Storytelling (NAPPS), now the National Storytelling Network was one of them. This professional organization helpedto organize resources for tellers and festival planners. Australia followed their American counterparts with the establishment of storytelling guilds in the late 1970s.Australian storytellingtoday has individuals and groups across the country.As of 2007, there are dozens of storytelling festivals and hundreds of professionalstorytellers around the world, and an international celebration of the art onWorldstorytelling day. The internet storytelling forum, STORYTELL,sponsored by theSchool of Library and Information Studies at Texas Woman's University in Denton,has over 500 subscribers worldwide.

Emancipation of the story

In oral traditions, stories are kept alive by being re-told again and again. The materialof any given story during this process naturally undergoes several changes andadaptations. When and whereoral traditionwas pushed back in favour of print media, the literary idea of theauthor as originator of a story'sauthoritativeversion changed