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Storytelling is the conveying of events in word
Word

A word is a unit of language that represents a concept which can be expressively communication with Meaning . A word consists of one or more morphemes which are linked more or less tightly together, and has a phonetic value....
s, image
Image

An image is an artifact, usually two-dimensional , that has a similar appearance to some subject —usually a physical object or a person....
s, and sound
Sound

Sound is vibration transmitted through a solid, liquid, or gas, composed of frequencies within the range of hearing and of a threshold of hearing to be heard, or the sensation stimulated in organs of hearing by such vibrations....
s often by improvisation
Improvisation

Improvisation is the practice of acting, singing, talking and reacting, of making and creating, in the moment and in response to the stimulus of one's immediate environment and inner feelings....
 or embellishment. Stories or narratives have been shared in every culture and in every land as a means of entertainment
Entertainment

Entertainment is an activity designed to give people pleasure or relaxation. An audience may participate in the entertainment passively as in watching opera or a movie, or actively as in games....
, education, preservation of culture
Culture

Culture is difficult to define. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions....
 and in order to instill moral
Moral

A moral is a message conveyed or a lesson to be learned from a story or event. The moral may be left to the hearer, reader or viewer to determine for themselves, or may be explicitly encapsulated in a maxim....
 values.






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Quotations


The point of a story can penetrate far deeper than the point of any bullet.

Lawrence Nault - The Mountain Hermit Category:Themes





Encyclopedia


Millais Boyhoodofraleigh
Storytelling is the conveying of events in word
Word

A word is a unit of language that represents a concept which can be expressively communication with Meaning . A word consists of one or more morphemes which are linked more or less tightly together, and has a phonetic value....
s, image
Image

An image is an artifact, usually two-dimensional , that has a similar appearance to some subject —usually a physical object or a person....
s, and sound
Sound

Sound is vibration transmitted through a solid, liquid, or gas, composed of frequencies within the range of hearing and of a threshold of hearing to be heard, or the sensation stimulated in organs of hearing by such vibrations....
s often by improvisation
Improvisation

Improvisation is the practice of acting, singing, talking and reacting, of making and creating, in the moment and in response to the stimulus of one's immediate environment and inner feelings....
 or embellishment. Stories or narratives have been shared in every culture and in every land as a means of entertainment
Entertainment

Entertainment is an activity designed to give people pleasure or relaxation. An audience may participate in the entertainment passively as in watching opera or a movie, or actively as in games....
, education, preservation of culture
Culture

Culture is difficult to define. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions....
 and in order to instill moral
Moral

A moral is a message conveyed or a lesson to be learned from a story or event. The moral may be left to the hearer, reader or viewer to determine for themselves, or may be explicitly encapsulated in a maxim....
 values. Crucial elements of stories and storytelling include plot
Plot

In literary and dramatic works, the plot is the primary sequence of events experienced by the protagonist. Aristotle wrote in Poetics that Mythos is the most important element of storytelling....
 and character
Character

Character may refer to:*Character , an agent in a work of literature, drama, opera or other works of fiction*Character , the abstraction of an observable physical or biochemical trait of an organism...
s, as well as the narrative point of view
Point of view (literature)

The narrative mode is the attribute of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical piece which describes the method used by the author to convey their story to the audience....
.

Storytelling has existed as long as humanity has had language
Language

A language is a form of symbol communication in which elements are combined to represents something other than themselves. Language can also refer to the use of such systems as a general phenomenon....
.

The evolution of technology has changed the tools available to storytellers. The earliest forms of storytelling are thought to have been primarily oral combined with gestures and expressions. Rudimentary drawings scratched onto the walls of caves
Rock art

Rock art is a term in archaeology for any man-made markings made on natural stone. They can be divided into:*Petroglyphs - carvings into stone surfaces...
 may also be forms of early storytelling. Ephemeral media such as sand, leaves, and the carved trunks of living trees have also been used to record stories in pictures or with writing. With the advent of writing
Writing

Writing is the representation of language in a textual Media through the use of a set of signs or symbols . It is distinguished from illustration, such as cave drawing and painting, and the recording of language via a non-textual medium such as Magnetic tape sound recording....
, the use of actual digit symbols to represent language, and the use of stable, portable media stories were recorded, transcribed and shared over wide regions of the world. Stories have been carved, scratched, painted, printed, or inked onto wood or bamboo, ivory and other bones, pottery, clay tablets, stone, palm-leaf books, skins (parchment), bark cloth, paper
Paper

Paper is thin material mainly used for writing upon, printing upon or packaging. It is produced by pressing together moist fibers, typically cellulose pulp derived from wood, rags or grasses, and drying them into flexible sheets....
, silk, canvas
Canvas

Canvas is an extremely heavy-duty plain weave cloth used for making sails, tents, marquees, backpacks, and other functions where sturdiness is required....
 and other textiles, recorded on film
Film

Film encompasses individual motion pictures, the field of film as an art form, and the film industry. Films are produced by recording images from the world with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or special effects....
 and stored electronically in digital form. Complex forms of tattooing may also represent stories, with information about genealogy, affiliation and social status.

Traditionally, oral stories were committed to memory and then passed from generation to generation. However, in the most recent past, written and televised media has largly surpassed this method communicating local, family and cultural histories.

Oral traditions


Albert Bates Lord
Albert Lord

Albert Bates Lord was a Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Harvard who, after the untimely death of Milman Parry, carried on that scholar's research into Epic poetry literature....
 examined oral narratives from field transcripts of Yugoslav oral bards collected by Milman Parry in the 1930s, and the texts of epics such as The Odyssey and Beowulf
Beowulf

Beowulf is an Old English language heroic Epic poetry of unknown authorship, dating as recorded in the Nowell Codex manuscript from between the 8th to the early 11th century, and relates events described as having occurred in what is now Denmark and Sweden....
. Lord found that a large part of the stories 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," certain set phrase
Set phrase

A set phrase is an expression whose parts are fixed . It is often possible to express the idea conveyed by a set phrase with a different phrasing, but it is markedness to do so....
s had long been known of in Homer
Homer

Homer is traditionally held to be the author of the ancient Greek language epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as of the Homeric Hymns....
 and other oral epics. But no one realized before Lord how common these formulas were. He discovered that across many story traditions that fully 90% of an oral epic is assembled from lines repeated verbatim or with one-for-one word substitutions. Oral stories are built out of phrases stockpiled from a lifetime of hearing and telling stories. The other type of story vocabulary is theme. A theme is a set sequence of story actions that structure the tale. Just as the teller of tales proceeds line-by-line using formulas, so he proceeds event-to-event using themes. One almost universal theme 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 a hero
Hero

A hero , in Greek mythology and folklore, was originally a demigod, the offspring of a mortal and a deity,their Greek hero cult being one of the most distinctive features of Religion in ancient Greece....
, starting with shirt and 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 / he disguises himself / his disguise fools everybody / except for a common person of little account (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 as James Frazer
James Frazer

Sir James George Frazer , was a Scotland social anthropologist influential in the early stages of the modern studies of mythology and comparative religion....
 saw in The Golden Bough, or archetypal, psychological truths as Joseph Campbell
Joseph Campbell

Joseph John Campbell was an United States mythologist, writer, and lecturer best known for his work in the fields of comparative mythology and comparative religion....
 describes in The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

The stories was described by Reynolds Price
Reynolds Price

Reynolds Price is an United States novelist, poet, dramatist, essayist and James B. Duke Professor of English at Duke University. Apart from English literature, Price has had a lifelong interest in ancient languages and Biblical scholarship....
, when he wrote:

A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens--second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths."


Folklorists sometimes divide oral tales into two main groups: "Märchen" and "Sagen". These are German
German language

German is a West Germanic languages, thus related to and classified alongside English language and Dutch language. It is one of the world's world language and the most widely spoken mother tongue in the European Union....
 terms for which there are no exact English
English language

English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa...
 equivalents; 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. They are clearly not intended to be understood as true. The stories are full of clearly defined incidents, and peopled by rather flat characters with little or no interior life. When the supernatural occurs, it is presented matter-of-factly, without surprise. Indeed, there is very little affect, generally; bloodcurdling events may take place, but with little call for emotional response from the listener.

"Sagen," best translated as "legends," are supposed to have actually happened, very often 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 fraught manner. Ghost and lover's leap stories belong in this category, as do many UFO-stories, and stories of supernatural beings and events. .

Storytelling as art form


Storytelling Festivals
Storytelling festival

A storytelling festival is often an annual event that features local, regional and/or nationally known oral storytellers. Each storyteller will have a scheduled amount of time to share a story with an audience....
 feature the work of several storytellers. Elements of the storytelling art form include visualization
Visualization

The term visualization may refer to:* Creative Visualization* Educational visualization* Flow visualization* Geovisualization* Illustration...
 (the seeing of images in the mind's eye), and vocal and bodily gestures. In many ways, the art of storytelling draws upon other art forms such as acting
Acting

Acting is the work of an actor or actress, which is a person in theatre, television, film, or any other storytelling medium who tells the story by portraying a Fictional character and, usually, Speech communication or singing the written text or Play ....
, oral interpretation
Oral Interpretation

Oral Interpretation is a dramatic art, also commonly called "interpretive reading" and "dramatic reading", though these terms are more conservative and restrictive....
, and performance studies
Performance Studies

Performance studies has been growing as an academic specialty since the 1970s. Indeed, it has produced a wide variety of perspectives and it is now integrated into a number of social scientific disciplines , humanities and is a growing discipline in and of itself ....
.

Several storytelling organizations started in the US during the 1970's. National Association for the Perpetuation and Preservation of Storytelling (NAPPS), now the National Storytelling Network was one of them. This professional organization helped to organize resources for tellers and festival planners. As of 2007, there are dozens of storytelling festivals and hundreds of professional storytellers around the world, and an international celebration of the art on World storytelling day
World Storytelling Day

World Storytelling Day is a global celebration of the art of oral storytelling. It is celebrated every year on the spring equinox in the northern hemisphere, the first day of autumn equinox in the southern....
.

Emancipation of the story

In oral tradition, where stories were passed on by being told and re-told again and again, the material of any given story during this process naturally underwent several changes and adaptation
Adaptation (disambiguation)

Adaptation may refer to* Adaptation, an anatomical structure, physiological process or behavioral trait that has evolved.* Cellular adaptation, the changes made by a cell in response to changes in its environment...
s. When and where oral tradition
Oral tradition

Oral tradition, oral culture and oral lore are messages or testimony transmitted orally from one generation to another. The messages or testimony are verbally transmitted in speech or song and may take the form, for example, of folktales, sayings, ballads, songs, or chants....
 was pushed back in favour of print media, the literary
Literature

Literature is the art of written works. Literally translated, the word means "acquaintance with letters" . In Western culture the most basic written literary types include fiction and non-fiction....
 idea
Idea

An idea is a form formed by consciousness through the process of Ideation . Human capability to contemplate ideas is associated with the ability of reasoning, human self-reflection, and of the ability to acquire and apply intellect, intuition, inspiration, etc.....
 of the author
Author

An author is defined both as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created....
 as originator of a story's authoritative
Authority

In government, authority is often used interchangeably with the term "power ". However, their meanings differ: while "power" refers to the ability to achieve certain ends, "authority" refers to a claim of legitimacy , the justification and right to exercise that power....
 version changed people's perception
Perception

In psychology and the cognitive sciences, perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of sense information. It is a task far more complex than was imagined in the 1950s and 1960s, when it was predicted that building perceiving machines would take about a decade, a goal which is still very far from fruition....
 of stories themselves. In the following centuries, stories tended to be seen as the work of individuals rather than a collective. Only recently, when a significant number of influential authors began questioning their own role, the value of stories as such - independent of authorship - was again recognized. Literary critics such as Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes was a France literary theory, philosopher, critic, and Semiotics. Barthes's work extended over many fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism and post-structuralism....
 even proclaimed the Death of the Author
Death of the Author

"Death of the Author" is an essay by the French literary critic Roland Barthes that was first published in the American journal Aspen . The essay later appeared in an anthology of his essays, Image-Music-Text , a book that also included "From Work To Text"....
.

See also

  • Antenarrative
    Antenarrative

    Antenarrative is a story concept invented by David Boje in 2001, Narrative Methods for Organization and Communication Research. London, Sage. In ?antenarrative? , storytelling is no more than a bet, a scrawny pre-story....
  • Djemaa el Fna
    Djemaa el Fna

    Djemaa el Fna is a square and market place in Marrakesh's medina quarter . The origin of its name remains unknown : it means Assembly of the dead in Arabic, but as the word djemaa also means mosque in Arabic, it could also mean place of the vanished mosque, in reference to a destroyed Almoravids mosque....
  • Dramatic structure
    Dramatic structure

    Dramatic structure is the plot structure of a dramatic work such as a Play or screenplay. Many scholars have analyzed dramatic structure, beginning with Aristotle in his Poetics ....
  • Fable
    Fable

    A fable is a succinct story, in prose or verse, that features animals, plants, inanimate, or nature which are anthropomorphized , and that illustrates a moral lesson , which may at the end be expressed explicitly in a pithy maxim ....
  • Fairy tale
    Fairy tale

    A fairy tale is a fictional story that may feature folklore characters such as Fairy, goblins, Elf, trolls, giant , and talking animals, and usually enchanted, often involving a far-fetched sequence of events....
  • Folklore
    Folklore

    Folklore is the body of expressive culture, including tales, music, dance, legends, oral history, proverbs, jokes, superstitions, customs, and so forth within a particular population comprising the traditions of that culture, subculture, or group ....
  • Maggid
    Maggid

    Maggid , sometimes spelled as magid) is traditional Eastern European Jewish religious itinerant preacher, skilled as a narrator of Torah and religious stories....
  • Mythology
    Mythology

    The word mythology refers to a body of folklore/myths/legends that a particular culture believes to be true and that often use the supernatural to interpret natural events and to explain the nature of the universe and humanity....
  • Narrative
    Narrative

    A narrative or story that is created in a constructive format that describes a sequence of fictional or Non-fiction events. It derives from the Latin language verb narrare, which means "to recount" and is related to the adjective gnarus, meaning "knowing" or "skilled"....
  • One person show
  • Oral history
    Oral history

    Oral history can be defined as the recording, preservation and interpretation of history, based on the personal experiences and opinions of the speaker....
  • Organization story
    Organization story

    Organizational stories or 'living stores' is one of several elements of storytelling, including narratives and antenarrative. Organization stories are the texts, spoken or written, as well as visual that usually involve a plot of different interconnected events, binding different characters together about an organization....
  • Organizational storytelling
    Organizational storytelling

    The study of organizational storytelling, sometimes called ?Narrative Knowledge,? attempts to recount events in the form of a story within the context of an organization....
  • Scheherazade
    Scheherazade

    Scheherazade , sometimes Scheherazadea, Persian transliteration Shahrazad or Shahrzad , is a legendary Persian Empire queen and the storyteller of One Thousand and One Nights....
  • Seanchaí
  • Shuochang
    Shuochang

    Shuochang is a form of traditional China storytelling , with many regional subgenres; it is also often referred to as "narrative." Shuochang performances usually intermix speaking and singing, and are accompanied by percussion instruments and sometimes also plucked or bowed string instruments....
  • Sjuzhet
    Sjuzhet

    Fabula and Sujet are terms, originating in Russian Formalism and employed in narratology, that describe narrative construction. Sujet is an employment of narrative and fabula is the order of retelling events....
  • Story arc
    Story arc

    A story arc is an extended or continuing narrative in episode storytelling media such as television, comic books, comic strips, boardgames, video games, and in some cases, films....
  • Storyboard
    Storyboard

    Storyboards are graphic organizers such as a series of illustrations or s displayed in sequence for the purpose of previsualizing a motion graphic or interactive media sequence, including website interactivity....
  • Storytelling game
    Storytelling game

    A storytelling game is a game where two or more persons collaborate on storytelling a spontaneous plot . Usually, each player takes care of one or more player character in the developing story....
  • Storytelling festival
    Storytelling festival

    A storytelling festival is often an annual event that features local, regional and/or nationally known oral storytellers. Each storyteller will have a scheduled amount of time to share a story with an audience....
  • World Storytelling Day
    World Storytelling Day

    World Storytelling Day is a global celebration of the art of oral storytelling. It is celebrated every year on the spring equinox in the northern hemisphere, the first day of autumn equinox in the southern....


Further reading

  • Bernard, Sheila Curran. Burlington, MA: Focal Press, 2007
  • Beyer, Jürgen, , Electronic Journal of Folklore, vol. 4 (1997), 43-60
  • Bruner, Jerome S.
    Jerome Bruner

    Jerome Seymour Bruner is an United States psychologist who has contributed to cognitive psychology and cognitive learning theory in educational psychology and to the general philosophy of education....
         Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press
    Harvard University Press

    Harvard University Press is a publishing house, a division of Harvard University, that is highly respected in academic publishing. It was established on January 13, 1913....
    . 1986. ISBN 0674003659
  • Bruner, Jerome S. Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
    Farrar, Straus and Giroux

    Farrar, Straus and Giroux is an American book publishing company, founded in 1946 by Roger W. Straus, Jr. and John Chipman Farrar. Known primarily as Farrar, Straus in its first decade of existence, the company was renamed several times, including Farrar, Straus and Young and Farrar, Straus and Cudahy and finally to its curr...
    . 2002. ISBN 0374200246
  • Gargiulo, Terrence L. Stories at Work: Using Stories to Improve Communication and Build Relationships. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers. 2006. ISBN 0275987310
  • Gargiulo, Terrence L. The Strategic Use of Stories in Organizational Communication and Learning. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe. 2005. ISBN 0765614138
  • Leitch, Thomas M. What Stories Are: Narrative Theory and Interpretation. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press. 1986. ISBN 0271004312
  • McKee, Robert
    Robert McKee

    Robert McKee, born 1941, is a creative writing instructor who is widely known for his popular "Story Seminar", which he developed when he was a professor at the University of Southern California....
    .     Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. New York: ReganBooks
    ReganBooks

    ReganBooks was a United States bestselling imprint or division of HarperCollins book publishing house , headed by editor and publisher Judith Regan, started in 1994 and ended in late 2006....
    . 1997. ISBN 0060391685
  • Mitchoff, Kate Houston. "Ignite the story within: a librarian makes a case for using storytelling to increase literacy". School Library Journal
    School Library Journal

    School Library Journal is a monthly publication with articles and reviews for school and public librarians who work with young people.It was founded in 1954 as Junior Libraries after breaking off from Library Journal....
    . New York: R.R. Bowker Xerox
    Xerox

    Xerox Corporation is a global document management company which manufactures and sells a range of color and black-and-white Computer printer, multifunction systems, photo copiers, digital production printing presses, and related consulting services and supplies....
    . 1961. ISSN 0362-8930 OCLC 99656380 (REPRINT: 2005, February. ERIC Document EJ710440.)
  • Randall, W. "Restorying a Life: Adult Education and Transformative Learning." In Aging and Biography: Explorations in Adult Development. Edited by James E. Birren et al., pp. 224-247. New York: Springer Publishing, 1996. ISBN 0826189806
  • Reis, Pamela Tamarkin. "Genesis as Rashomon: The creation as told by God and man." Bible Review
    Bible Review

    Bible Review is a publication that sought to connect the academic study of the Bible to a broad general audience. Covering both the Old Testament and New Testaments, Bible Review presented critical and historical interpretations of biblical texts, and ?reader-friendly Biblical scholarship? from 1985 to 2005....
     17 (3). Washington, D.C.: Biblical Archaeology Society
    Biblical Archaeology Society

    The Biblical Archaeology Society is a non-denominational organization that supports and promotes biblical archaeology. It publishes Biblical Archaeology Review....
    . 2001. ISSN 8755-6316
  • Shedlock, Marie L. . D. Appleton & Company
    D. Appleton & Company

    D. Appleton & Company was an United States company founded by Daniel Appleton , who opened a general store which included books. Appleton was born in Haverhill, Massachusetts and died in New York City....
    , New York, 1917. ISBN 1406815225
  • Wiessner, C. A. Stories of Change: Narrative in Emancipatory Adult Education. Thesis Ed. D. dissertation, Teachers College, Columbia University
    Columbia University

    Columbia University in the City of New York , is a private university in the United States and a member of the Ivy League. Columbia's main campus lies in the Morningside Heights, Manhattan neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan, in New York City....
    . 2001. OCLC 80185345


External links