Storytelling, Self, Society: An Interdisciplinary Journal
of Storytelling Studies
Once Upon a Time:
An Introduction
to the Inaugural Issue
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a certain circle of adherents, the contemporary revival of storytelling is widely
celebrated as having been initiated in October, 1973, with the first National
Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee. In fact, that festival did
herald the beginning of a contemporary performance movement based iconically on the traditional art, but incorporating many
other modes of verbal performance, including: oral interpretation, theatrical
impersonation, chamber theatre, children’s theatre, performance art, stand-up
comedy, New Vaudeville, singer/songwriting, confessional monologue, performance
poetry, and mime. While running a gamut of contemporary solo forms,
storytelling evokes historic lineages, from bardic
courts and griot assemblies, to the front porches of
rural
Meanwhile, over that same 30-year
period, practitioners and scholars across a wide spectrum of social, artistic,
religious, therapeutic, and academic fields have been vigorously reclaiming the
powers of storytelling as fundamental to their work. In homiletics, narrative
theology (Frei); in medicine, narrative medicine (Charon, Frank, Mattingly); in history, narrative
historiography (White); in the social sciences (Czarniawska,
de Rivera and Sarbin), postmodern or reflexive
ethnography and “thick description”—a conscious struggle with and surrender to
the imperatives of narrative genres in fieldwork reporting (Clifford, Geertz, Tyler); in communication, the narrative paradigm
(Fisher, Langellier, Peterson, Sunwolf);
in business, narrative management and the narrative organization (Demming); in psychology, narrative therapy (Kleinman, Polkinghorne, Sarbin); in education, narrative pedagogy (Egan, Paley); in cognitive
science, narrative thinking and narrative mind (Bruner, Schank);
in humanistic psychology, personal mythology (Bond, Campbell, Cousineau, Larsen, McAdams, Stromer),
and in postmodern visual and performance art the self-same narrative turn (Bonney, Gray, Miller)—all these emerging fields and more
have laid claim to the power of story. Yet many influential practitioners and
theorists in these parallel movements would not willingly be caught in a
storytelling festival crowd; they might only use the word “storytelling” in
unguarded moments, or to express a deliberately distanced, manipulative or
ironic folksiness.
Naming is a key to identity. The logos, or language core,
of an organization, a movement, a discipline, or a publication, is also
an essential constituent of its mythos.
Narrative may indeed be the term of choice for scholars and respectable
practitioners, that is, those with an interest in appealing to the inclinations
of adults in realms of power, prestige, and influence—the tenure track
included. The word narrative comes
from the Indo-European root gna, meaning both “to know” and “to tell” (White). Some
storytellers, though, exhibit a self-conscious gag reflex at the rampant
substitution of “the N- word” for their own cherished logo, calling it a sign
of pretension and over-intellectualization. The age-old rivalry of heart and
head is certainly hard at work in these schismatic responses. Nonetheless,
there are authentic and significant distinctions between the two terms—not just
differences in implied temperament and status, but objective differences in the
realms that they represent and in the directions they point for researchers. At
the outset of a publication like this one, it is important to declare those
differences, to position ourselves in relationship to them, and to set a course
accordingly.
Perhaps the most comprehensive
and least pejorative expression of the narrative realm is this famous passage
by Roland Barthes, from Image, Music, Text (1997):
The
narratives of the world are numberless. Narrative is first and foremost a
prodigious variety of genres, themselves distributed amongst different
substances—as though any material were fit to receive man’s stories. Able to be
carried by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images,
gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances; narrative is present
in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy,
mime, painting . . . stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news item,
conversation. Moreover, under this almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative
is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the
very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a
people without narrative. All classes, all human groups, have their
narratives. . . . Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself. (79)
In celebrating the vast supermediate character of narrative, Barthes suggests for reflection many critical things that storytelling is not, and suggests by reflection one critical thing that storytelling is. Storytelling is not literature, though its images are often translated into literary forms; nor is it any of a range of sub-literary and post-literary genres like diaries, letters, e-mails, or blogs, though these partake in varying degrees of the informality, intimacy, and evanescence of storytelling; it is not film, though when filmmakers work with particular narrative force (or “immediacy”) they are often epitomized as “storytellers;” it is not popular music on CD or video, though the music industry has been equally keen to appropriate the term; it is not journalism, though the best journalists have struggled to recapture the sense of a human voice within the constricting frameworks of the media-industrial complex; nor is it computer animation, though the creators of such products strain to regard them as storytelling games, and in fact the games can be organized by the rules of storytelling genres.
We would assert, not as an a priori assumption, but as a postulate for exploration, dialogue,
and research, that storytelling is not,
in fact, a product that exists authentically within the bounds of any
technological extension of the human body and senses—though any media product
can employ images and genre markers that have their basis in storytelling.
Storytelling is a medium in its own
right, an artistic process that works with what we may call the technologies of
the human mainframe—memory, imagination, emotion, intellect, language, gesture,
movement, expression (of face and of body) and, most crucially, relationship in
the living moment—person-to-person or person-to-group. It is a medium that has
played a fundamental role in the evolution of these human body/mind-technologies;
and it is a medium that continues to carry a fundamental charge for developing
and for maintaining persons and cultures within their human element.
One of the central intuitive tenets of the
storytelling movement is that storytelling is a medium of connectivity and of
community. This is an intuition that needs to be examined, nuanced,
demonstrated, described, and replicated—not mechanistically, but in terms of
the principles of the medium itself. Storytelling,
Self, Society sets itself this task, among others: to steer between the
dangerous shoals of fetishizing this particular
medium (to the exclusion of the fertile channels that connect it with virtually
any other) and of surrendering to the metonymic swoon in which the name storytelling can be bestowed on whatever
one finds sufficiently uplifting.
Despite the fact that
storytelling, as a popular performing art, is widely consigned to
nostalgia-padded margins of the dominant culture, the essential impulses of the
storytelling medium course powerfully through every cultural level, from the
boardrooms of business to the consulting rooms of medicine to the sanctuaries
of churches, mosques, and temples, to courtrooms of the legal system, to the
stages of theatres that would never publicly declare themselves storytelling
venues. The circles that have largely defined themselves heretofore as “the
storytelling world” have struggled to break through
and connect to these larger spheres of influence—yet, at the same time, forces
within that storytelling world may have been significantly complicit in keeping
these spheres apart.
This paradoxical impulse of both
reaching towards and resisting accommodation with sources of institutional
power is common in revitalization movements, which begin as bands of outsiders
seeking alternatives to an unsatisfying cultural set (Sobol).
All along the way there has been a tender protectiveness in the community
towards the sacred quality of innocence, so evident in the quasi-religious
rhetoric and atmosphere of storytelling events—yet a corresponding and
contradictory quality of missionary zeal, of proselytizing fervor. How to spread the Gospel of Storytelling without corruption,
especially if the gentiles persist in pronouncing it “Narrative?”
Temptations have arrived in a
predictable procession over the years—professionalization,
(with its attendant commodification), the star system
(canon formation), corporate sponsorship
(globalization), concentration of organizational power (Jonesborough’s Vaticanization)—and all have been accommodated with greater
or lesser degrees of resolution. Now the
storytelling community is facing new levels of challenge/opportunity. The
movement has passed its 30th year, at least according to the Jonesborough
nativity calendar. Saturn has made a full transit in this corporate lifetime.
In Erikson’s human developmental model, the
storytelling world in the
Contemporary storytellers have
long sought to document and reproduce their work in various media forms, no
matter how problematic and often unsatisfying those products turn out. In the freelance
performance worlds, books, cassettes, videos, and now CDs are standard coin of
the realm, like business cards and brochures. In academic realms, similar roles
may be played by rigorously researched, peer-reviewed articles that demonstrate
mastery of established disciplinary dialects while deploying those dialects to
illuminate key storytelling issues. For the purpose of establishing
storytelling studies within the departmental structures of colleges and
universities, it is essential to build a body of such literature, a
conversation among scholars and artists from the numerous disciplines that owe
their own lifeblood to the storytelling art. Without a journal dedicated to
serve as a vehicle for these pieces, they are far less likely to be published
or created, just as stories without a ready context tend to remain untold.
The contemporary storytelling
world is an artworld, in sociologist Howard Becker’s
sense, but one with a particularly dense and low-lying ecology. It resembles
some tenacious and wide-spreading plant whose root system covers enormous
acreage, and which subsists for much of its range and for most of the yearly
cycle as ground cover, but which blossoms at certain regular and sometimes
startling intervals into public displays. When the original National
Storytelling Association divided in 1998 into two organizations (the National
Storytelling Network, and the International Storytelling Center), they each
looked at their missions and constituencies and realized, not for the first
time but with renewed force, that freelance festival performance was only a
small part of their missions. This was not merely because many call but few are
chosen—but because for some of the membership all of the time and all of the
membership some of the time, the strongest growth in their work has been in
those low-lying, unspectacular areas known as applied storytelling—that is,
storytelling as a tool in education, organizational development, social action,
therapy, ministry, medicine and healing arts, to name only a few. Thus much of
the large-scale research writing in this journal will be devoted to studies of
those applied fields. At the same time, the artistic scope and excellence of
storytelling platform performance is essential to track and to nurture. The
roots, leaves, branches, and flowers of this art all need water and light for
cultivation. So the journal will also feature sections on pedagogy, performance
practice, and reviews of platform performances and media documents as well. The
goal is to develop a place to explore and to map the deep, manifold life of the
storytelling discipline.
After the division of the major
national storytelling organization into two, NSN further articulated itself
into Special Interest Groups (SIGs). These, so far, include the Healing Story
Alliance (focusing primarily on storytelling in therapy, social work,
counseling, and medical settings), Storytelling in Organizations (focusing on
business and organizational development), Youth Storytelling (focusing on
storytelling by young people), Storytelling for K-12 (focusing on storytelling for young people), Storytelling in
Higher Education (colleges and universities), and Storytelling Organizers (for
organizers of public storytelling events). Freelance performers, typically perhaps,
do not yet have their own special interest group, though many freelance
performers and practitioners have joined one or more of the applied SIGs. This
new articulation of the storytelling community has finally enabled the
development of this journal. It has decisively foregrounded
the need on the part of storytelling practitioners to have sound, peer-reviewed
studies to back their intuitive claims of storytelling’s efficacy.
The push and pull, the attraction and resistance,
between storytellers and the Academy can also be seen in Jungian terms, as the
opposition of Logos and Eros. The Academy has evolved in a
patriarchal environment dedicated to the principle of Logos, the domain of rationality, knowledge, and abstraction.
Storytelling embraces the feminine principle of Eros, which carries emotion, relatedness, and spirituality; and
that Eros principle has shaped the
environment and the orientation of storytelling devotees and their gatherings.
Our task, then, as professors of storytelling in the academic realms, is one of
bringing these domains together. It strikes us as a task worthy of the Hero’s
Journey: to create a marriage of emotionally connected research and
intellectually open, exploratory storytelling. The Storytelling, Self, Society
Conference convened by Caren Neile
and the South Florida Storytelling Project at Florida Atlantic University,
March 6-7, 2004, was an important step in bridging the divide. This inaugural
issue, which is composed of proceedings from that conference, represents a small
cross-section of that burgeoning conversation. There is so much more to come.
So, for the support and
encouragement of the National Storytelling Network and its Special Interest
Groups, particularly Storytelling in Higher Education, the Healing Story Alliance,
and Storytelling in Organizations and for the passionate hospitality of the
South Florida Storytelling Project of Florida Atlantic University, the editors
offer our most profound gratitude. We stand proudly on the shoulders of that
great body of tellers, listeners, scholars, and lovers of storytelling who have
taken the journey before us.
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Becker, Howard. Artworlds.
Bond, D. Stephenson. Living Myth:
Personal Meaning as a Way of Life.
Bonney, Jo. Extreme
Exposure: An Anthology of Solo Performance Texts from the Twentieth Century.
Bruner, Jerome. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds.
—. Making Stories: Law,
Literature, Life.
Campbell, Joseph. The
Hero with a Thousand Faces.
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God. 4 vols.
Charon, Rita, and Maria Montello. Narrative
Matters.
Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography.
Cousineau, Phil. Once
and Future Myths: The Power of Ancient Stories in Modern Times.
Czarniawska, Barbara. Narrating the Organization: Dramas of
Institutional Identity.
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Social Science Research.
Denning, Stephen. The
Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations.
de Rivera, Joseph, and Theodore R. Sarbin. Believed-In Imaginings: The
Narrative Construction of Reality.
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Breathing Life Into the Story. 10 May 2004. http://arc.episcopalchurch.org/myp/ecce/biblicalstorytelling.htm.
Egan, Kieran. Teaching
as Storytelling.
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“Forced from Home.” Austin Chronicle,
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Communication as Narration.
Frank, Arthur. The Wounded
Storyteller: Body, Illness, Ethics.
Frei, Hans. Theology
and Narrative: Selected Essays. Ed. George Hunsinger and William C. Placher.
Gentile, John S. “A TPQ
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One-Person Shows from the Chautauqua Platform to the Broadway Stage.
Gray, Spalding. Sex and Death to the Age of 14.
Jung, Carl Gustav. “The Syzygy:
Anima and Animus,” Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self
(Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9, Part 2. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. 2nd
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Kleinman, Arthur. The
Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition.
Langellier, Kristin M., and Eric E.
Peterson. Storytelling in Daily Life: Performing
Narrative.
Larsen, Stephen. The Mythic
Imagination: Your Quest for Inner Meaning Through
Personal Mythology.
Mattingly, Cheryl. Healing
Dramas and Clinical Plots: The Narrative Structure of Experience.
McAdams, Dan P. The Stories We
Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self.
Miller, Tim. Body Blows: Six
Performances.
Paley, Vivian Gussow. You Can’t Say You Can’t Play.
Polkinghorne, Donald E. Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences.
Sarbin, Theodore. Narrative
Psychology: The Storied Nature of Human Conduct.
Schank, Roger C. Tell Me
a Story: A New Look at Real and Artificial Memory.
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Storytellers’ Journey: An American Revival.
Stromer, Richard S. “Faith In the
Journey: Personal Mythology as Pathway to the Sacred.” Diss. Pacifica
Graduate Institute, 2003.
Sunwolf. “The Pedagogical and Persuasive Effects of Native American Lesson Stories, African Dilemma Tales, and Sufi Wisdom
Tales.” Howard Journal of
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White, Hayden. The Content of the Form:
Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation.