Oral Narratives

10 Key excerpts on "Oral Narratives"

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  Folk Stories and Personal Narratives in Palestinian Spoken Arabic

  A Cultural and Linguistic Study

  • N. Sirhan(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Thus, speech, from the beginning, is an agency of both order and disorder: a vehicle through which power is expressed and homage is paid; and a way, through curses, spells, lies and arguments, of causing divisiveness, witchcraft, and death. To be human is to control words and to pursue eloquence. To tell stories is to enter the constant recreation of the world, of community, of mankind. (Abrahams 1983: 22)

  Once again we see the significance of the uttered word. ‘This potency of the spoken language must be remembered when discussing tales – because tales are, in the ears of their hearers, permissible lies’ (ibid.: 1). It is undoubtedly from this idea that the saying ‘telling tales’ is used as a euphemism for ‘telling lies’. Abrahams accurately identifies that narrating is the only time when people are essentially asking to be told ‘lies’ in order to be diverted or instructed, among other things.

  2.3 Oral Narratives and written literature

  The question ‘What differentiates Oral Narratives from written literature?’ continues to be debated. There is no all-encompassing theory that defines Oral Narratives in their totality and which could be applicable across the board. Though there are properties pertaining exclusively to Oral Narratives not found in written literature and vice versa, it is in the shared space between the two modes that the difficulty lies.

  Oral discourse is used as an umbrella heading for any narratives that are performed orally including not only those composed orally but also those composed in writing. There is, however, the complication of Western drama, which is composed in writing and performed, but is not considered to belong to oral discourse. On the contrary, Western plays are studied and analysed as a form of written literature (see Foley 2002). This is also true of oratory – prepared in writing and delivered orally – which is not considered to be part of the oral tradition. Many people have tried to define the term ‘narrative’ (see Genette, Labov, Trask) and in its most basic sense ‘oral narrative’ refers to the relating of a connected series of events through speech. At first glance, it appears that if oral discourse is thus defined, then the distinction between Oral Narratives and written literature is a simple one. This is by no means the case.

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  The Routledge Companion to Native American Literature

  • Deborah L. Madsen, Deborah L. Madsen(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  28 The Historical and Literary Role of Folklore, Storytelling, and the Oral Tradition in Native American Literatures

  Susan Berry Brill de Ramírez

  DOI: 10.4324/9781315777344-28

  To understand any written literature, attention needs to be paid to its craft, its distinctive language and rhetoric, its style and form, its literariness. This is especially true for Native American literatures which are deeply informed by their respective tribal traditions of storytelling and oratory. And to begin to understand Native American literature, attention must be paid to the language, form, rhetoric, and literariness which are (1) in many cases reflective of present and past oral traditions and (2) integrally tied to tribal literary and linguistic heritage and influence. While the primacy of oral traditions as historically significant is a fact for all literatures, Native American literature stands out due to its ancestrally and culturally genetic positioning between its traditional, tribal oral cultures, languages, and rituals and its place as part of the larger American and Canadian literary canons. The precedence of orality in relation to literacy and textuality is a global fact: in terms of chronology, all written literatures have oral literary traditions as precedent and formative. However, for all of the tribes of North America, the shift to a predominantly written culture has been relatively recent within the global history of writing – for many tribes, largely occurring just within the past two centuries.

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  Oral History Theory

  • Lynn Abrams(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  For the oral historian there are several levels of narrative to identify in an oral history recording or transcript: first, the narrative created by the respondent; second, the narrative models upon which the respondent draws; and finally the narrative crafted by the historian from the accumulation of oral histories. In this chapter we will focus primarily on the first and second of these. We will introduce some of the approaches to narrative analysis and identify some possible narrative structures which help to shape people’s oral histories. We will then discuss some examples of the utility of narrative analysis for the oral historian focusing on the uses of narrative strategies in people’s oral accounts.

  Theory

  What is narrative?

  Narrative is a concept employed by theorists across the disciplines. Although linguistic theorists will speak of narrative as something embedded in every sign or text – such as a gesture or photograph for instance – in this discussion I am going to talk about narrative in a narrower sense as it applies to language and communication. Oral history, after all, depends primarily on words spoken and to a lesser extent on signs or other forms of text, so it is upon words that I focus.

  Narrative is the main means of communication, the way people use language to communicate experience, knowledge and emotions. A narrative is a story told according to certain cultural conventions and can be found within almost every mode of communication and within every culture. Narrative at its most basic level contains characters, a plot and a chronology. It is usually a communication about a life event and might take the form of any of a number of genres: a fairytale, a memory story, a speech, an anecdote, a folktale or an everyday speech act. It is, in the words of two theorists, ‘the name for an ensemble of linguistic, psychological, and social structures, transmitted cultural-historically, constrained by each individual’s level of mastery and by his or her mixture of communicative techniques and linguistic skills’.10

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  Narrative Analysis

  • Martin Cortazzi(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Opposite ideas about narrative are found in different cultural groups. Among the Gbeya in central Africa it is believed that no one is a good storyteller (Hymes, 1977, p. 127), whereas among the Limba it is held that anyone is a potential storyteller and it takes no special training to give a good performance of a narrative (Bauman, 1975, p. 299). When she compared the narratives of Greek and American women, told after viewing a film, Tannen (1980) concluded that the Greeks seemed to be ‘acute judges’ who recounted events and interpreted them, ascribing motives to characters and offering judgments. In contrast, the Americans were ‘acute recallers’ who gave more detailed, objective reports and showed concern with time reference. While Americans focussed on content, Greeks focussed on interpersonal involvement.

  Such variations in ways of speaking are commonly seen as reflections of cultural differences. However, speaking is itself a part of cultural behaviour and it partly shapes and mediates the whole (Hymes, 1977). Language is both cultural, as a form of symbolic organization of the world, and social, since it reflects and expresses group memberships and relationships. ‘It is discourse which creates, recreates, modifies, and fine tunes both culture and language’ (Sherzer, 1987, p. 296). Narrative, then, is a discourse structure or genre which reflects culture. It is a central medium of cultural expression, organization and learning. Furthermore, it also creates cultural contexts. Staffroom storytelling among teachers is thus a cultural context which comes into being as a story is told and appreciated. This cultural context has its own ways and carries its own meanings, and these may be quite different from the investigatory or analytical ways involved in doing research.

  The Structure and Function of Narrative in Different Cultures

  There have been numerous anthropological and folkloristic attempts to analyze the structure and function of Oral Narratives in particular cultures (Colby and Peacock, 1973; Clement and Colby, 1974). Many of these are second or third generation developments of Propp’s work (1968/1928), yet this research has not shown cumulative development. Each investigator has tended to invent new terms, units and levels of analysis to develop taxonomic or generative models rather than develop or refine a generally accepted model (Jason and Segal, 1977, p. 4). An example is Colby’s model of narrative analysis.

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  Creativity and Writing

  Developing Voice and Verve in the Classroom

  • Teresa Grainger, Kathy Goouch, Andrew Lambirth(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  It is widely accepted that story is a ‘fundamental structure of human experience’ (Clandinin and Connelly, 1990:2), a ‘primary act of mind transferred to art from life’ (Hardy, 1977:12) and as longitudinal research into early home and school language indicates, stories provide a major route to understanding for the young child (Wells, 1986). Different cultures and communities make different use of stories (Brice Heath, Gregory and Williams, 2000), but children’s own stories need to be recognised and not pushed off the agenda in favour of the teacher’s chosen texts. Children manipulate both the form and content of stories for their own purposes, learning to be literate through their encounters with different story voices. As humans we all engage in inner and outer storytelling and through the process we build our experience of living, shape our identity, give order to chaos and make sense of both lived and vicarious experience. As Harold Rosen (1984) notes, narrative is an ‘irrepressible genre’ and a major means of thinking, communicating and making meaning right across the curriculum. Children with a wealth of experience of story, show considerable implicit knowledge about narrative conventions, plot lines and linguistic styles in their oral retellings (Fox, 1993), so the classroom needs to celebrate literature in all its forms. In reworking and retelling personal and traditional tales, as well as more overtly literary stories, children can become the official storytellers, interacting with their audience and reshaping their chosen tales through the creative social process. Their tales may be scribed by an adult, recorded onto tape or played out imaginatively, so the process of composition, whether oral or written, is supported from the outset (Burgess-Macey, 1999). Bilingual stories and storytelling can affirm children’s individual and social existences and encourage the creation of an inclusive culture in the classroom, in which children may switch languages comfortably (Romaine, 1989). Folktales have a particularly important role to play in providing a bridge from oracy to literacy since there is no absolute distinction between oral and written traditions. In retelling tales children are leaning on the voices of writers and oral storytellers; often, however, their retold tale will not need to be written as well as spoken, but the process and experience of telling, of bringing stories to life and regularly sharing them with interested others can, over time, make a marked contribution to their writing (Grainger, 1997, 2002).

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  Warriors of the Word

  The World of the Scottish Highlanders

  • Michael Newton(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Origin

    (Publisher)

  129 The historical framework and details of these historical legends and clan sagas have been inevitably modified by the verbal artistry of the storyteller: migratory motifs add colourful detail; the ‘laws of heroic biography’ influence the life story of historical figures (his birth is heralded by omens, he is exiled, etc.); supernatural elements increase dramatic intrigue; and so on. The practice of storytelling allows a community to explain itself to itself, and legends have significance exactly because of the relationship between subject and audience. Stories are not meant to be verbal enumerations of facts: they tend to survive in oral tradition only if they are good stories. They are thus shaped by the aesthetics of Gaelic oral tradition and subject to elaboration or reduction according to the expectations of their audience, amongst other factors.

  Although a great deal of Gaelic story and song survives surrounding the MacLeods, MacKenzies and Morrisons of Lewis during the attempted colonisation by the Fife Adventurers, for example, conflicts have been framed simply as clan warfare rather than as local resistance to the machinations of the state.130 The larger political context and external players (Lowland agents of King James VI, in this case) would have had little lasting meaning or interest to succeeding generations of tradition-bearers or their audience, while personal relationships to landed clans would have maintained interest and attention. The oral history embedded in such popular narratives can tell us much about local attitudes and perceptions, especially those from whom it is recorded, but other aspects of the larger-scale contemporary context must often be recovered from other sources. A comparative study of the history of the island of Tiree attests to the complementary nature of such materials:

  The written sources are mostly connected with the administration of the island by the Duke of Argyll, and tend to reflect the attitudes of the landowner and his agents. [. . .] Sometimes they throw a very clear light on social practices, but in general they do not reflect the attitudes and behaviour of the great mass of the population. The oral traditions of the island record the customs and beliefs of the islanders in considerable detail, and serve to compliment the written record. They provide reliable data on the history of families and communities of occupations and industries and many other aspects of life. But one has to handle oral traditions as critically as written records and be aware of their bias and omissions and distortions.131

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  You Don't Know Jack

  A Storyteller Goes to School

  • Kevin D. Cordi(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • University Press of Mississippi

    (Publisher)

  As Rosen (1988) observes, narratives are not as simple as a “neat match between experience and a sequence of clauses” (10). The match is never exact. Labov, other sociolinguists, and folklorists studying conversational narrative have pursued these ideas further to understand how narrative works in everyday interactions. Folk narrative research includes both textual comparative studies of tales collected from particular cultural groups and studies of traditional storytelling performances (Mills 1990).

  Recent years have seen a shift to narrative studies in education and social science. This research relies less on text and more on use: context of performance. “As a fundamental genre that organizes the way in which we think and interact, narrative encompasses an enormous range of discourse forms, including popular as well as artistic genres. The most basic and most universal form of narrative may not be the products of poetic muse, but of ordinary conversation” (Ochs and Capps 2001, 185). Ochs and Capps (2001) view use as a significant element of narrative. Hardy (1963) states from studying how narrative is used, “we understand how it is the ‘raison d’etre,’ why (narrative) was told and what the narrative is getting at” (12). In other words, when we study narrative, we learn how and why it is used. As mentioned, work on storytelling until the second half of the twentieth century focused not on the interaction involved in narratives, but on the actual content, the text, itself.

  When we think of narrative, literary forms come to mind as narrative texts par excellence. At least since Aristotle’s Poetics, narrative genres such as tragedy and comedy have been the preoccupation of philosophers and critics (Ochs & Capps, 2001, 185).

  Over the past decade or so, the analysis of narrative in the social sciences has shifted away from an exclusive interest in content. “Analyses of narratives focus more on the ways in which storytellers and the conditions of storytelling, shape what is conveyed as on what content of those stories tell us about people’s lives” (Elliott 2005, 42).

  Storytelling and storymaking are primarily concerned with how people communicate, including listening and telling. How narratives are performed is becoming increasingly important to researchers such as Langellier and Peterson (2004), who turned their attention to the performance aspect of storytelling: “The intervention shifts analytic focus from story text to storytelling performances as embodied, situated, and embedded in fields of discourse” (2). Narratives found in conversation are called, “performance narratives” (3). The mere act of “let me tell a story” creates a relationship between storyteller and listeners as audience so that “the telling of a story is a performance” (2). However, I wonder if stories are performed when uttered, could stories shared in everyday conversations also be a form of performance? If true, this allows me to rethink how storymaking could be an integral part of performance. Viewing all stories uttered as performance, Langellier and Peterson (2004) believe students working in small groups sharing ideas, often in the form of narrative exchanges, are performing within these exchanges. “As a human communication practice, performing narrative combines the performative ‘doing’ of storytelling with what is ‘done’ in the performance of a story” (2). Each communicative utterance could be seen as a performance of stories.

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  Teaching Fiction in the Primary School

  Classroom Approaches to Narratives

  • Dennis Carter(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter Four Exploring oral traditions Oral traditions

  Oral culture can be defined as ‘culture without writing’ and it is sometimes assumed that oral culture was gradually replaced by culture with writing or literary culture’. It seems obvious that the book replaced the spoken story as the main source of information, belief, song and story and the chief means of educating people. However, as Goody argues, ‘Writing does not supplant oral communication; it is merely another channel of communication, substituting for the oral only in certain contexts but at the same time developing new ones.’1

  The rise of alphabets and the printing press did change the role of oral communication in the development of culture. Goody continues:

  Oral communication in societies with writing is not the same as it is in those without it. In the latter the oral tradition has to bear all the burden of cultural transmission. In literate societies, however, the oral tradition is vested with only part of the total body of literary activity, of standardised verbal forms.2

  The recent revival of storytelling to become a popular form of entertainment in its own right suggests it was not so much replaced in our culture as neglected. With the rediscovery of storytelling has come the realisation of its educational value. The storytellers of the oral cultures, who carried, to use Goody’s phrase, ‘all the burden of cultural transmission’, not only developed prodigious memories but also great mental agility in adapting their stories to each audience. These abilities are as valuable in contemporary society as ever they were. Indeed, a modern economy, more dependent on services than manufacturing, requires people with flexible minds, long memories and quick recall, who can adapt quickly. Most of all it needs articulate people, who can tell stories in the broadest sense. So, strangely, many of the bases of oral culture are necessary again.

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  Handbook of Diachronic Narratology

  • Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  Oral Storytelling in Ancient Greek and German Medieval Literature

  Sonja Zeman

  1  Definition

  Storytelling can be oral in various ways. The term “oral storytelling” covers different types of narrative: (1) conversational narratives spontaneously produced in spoken language; (2) traditional narratives transmitted orally from one generation to another without the aid of writing, including oral poetry, but also songs, magic spells, folktales, and genealogies; (3) oral poetry in a narrow sense, i.e., verse-form epic narratives composed in oral performance by a poet in the immediate presence of an audience. “Oral” thus refers not only to the distinction between “spoken” and “written” language, but also to different medial aspects of narratives: their transmission, composition, and performance as well as their cultural context (“oral predisposition”). This is the case particularly for oral poetry, which has been the main focus of diachronic narrativity. With respect to the question of how orality affects the diachronic patterns of ancient and medieval storytelling, it is thus vital to distinguish between different dimensions of orality and their different influence on narrative structure.

  2  Dimensions of Orality

  Investigations of oral storytelling in older stages of language are faced with two problems in particular. First, apparent “oral” residues are analyzed in texts that are preserved only in written form. Second, it is nowadays commonly acknowledged that orality and literacy are not two categories that can be dichotomously distinguished from each other. Rather, many narratives in older stages of language are characterized by the coexistence of orality and literacy (e.g., Bakker 1997b ; Niles 1999 ; Chinca and Young 2005 ; Hall 2008 ). As a result, several dimensions of orality have been identified in order to do justice to the variety of different forms of oral storytelling.

  2.1

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  The Art of Storytelling for Teachers and Pupils

  Using Stories to Develop Literacy in Primary Classrooms

  • Elizabeth Grugeon, Paul Garder(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The National Literacy Strategy Framework for Teaching (DfEE 1998) is closely related to the English Order and provides a more detailed basis for implementing the statutory requirements of the programmes of study. The focus is on Reading and Writing but in the Reception Year we find that considerable emphasis is placed on the development of oral storytelling: ‘Pupils should be taught to use knowledge of familiar texts to re-enact or re-tell to others, recounting the main points in correct sequence’ and ‘to be aware of story structures e.g. actions/reactions, consequences and the ways that stories are built up and concluded’. In Year 1 Term 1 this is continued; they are ‘to re-enact stories in a variety of ways e.g. through role play, using dolls or puppets’. In Term 2, they ‘should be taught to re-tell stories, giving the main points in sequence’ and should practise using some of the key features of story language in oral retellings. In Term 3, they are ‘to prepare and re-tell stories orally, identifying and using some of the more formal features of story language.’ Early literacy development is seen to be dependent on a rich diet of stories read aloud and told. The National Literacy Strategy (NLS) implicitly acknowledges the significance of spoken language in this process. In Year 2 Term 2, although the emphasis has shifted from telling to writing, we still find that ‘pupils should be taught to prepare and re-tell stories individually and through role play in groups using dialogue …’. In Year 3 Term 1, pupils should ‘be aware of the different voices using dramatised readings showing differences between narrator and different characters used e.g. puppets to present stories’. This would clearly benefit from an oral as well as written approach. In Year 3 Term 3, under Reading and Comprehension strategies, pupils should be taught to ‘re-tell main points of story in sequence; to compare different stories …’. In the first three years of schooling the National Literacy Strategy systematically lays the foundation for increasingly sophisticted skills of comprehension and composition at text level in which oral storytelling can play a significant role. By Year 5 Term 2 children are required to become familiar with traditional stories, myths, legends and fables from a range of cultures. They will be expected to be able to ‘identify and classify the features of myths, legends and fables’ and to ‘explore the similarities and differences between oral and written storytelling’. Developing skill as tellers of stories will inform both the comprehension and composition of literary texts; practical experience will inform the analysis and construction of texts. Although the activities listed above only represent a very thin strand of text level work in the framework for teaching, it is nevertheless a significant one, which usefully overlaps with the requirements for drama in the National Curriculum.

  Storytelling and literacy

  While the National Literacy Strategy framework may seem to make little explicit reference to oracy, it is acknowledged that Speaking and Listening do provide the foundation for literacy, and the National Curriculum makes this explicit. What the Literacy Strategy does make clear, however, is the contribution that oral storytelling makes both to the development of writing and of reading; through telling stories children learn about their structure, the significance of the setting, the role of characterisation, and the power of the language; they learn to use language to create an effect on an audience. For all children there will be, at least initially, ‘a gap … between what they can say and what they can comfortably produce in writing’ (Fox 1993:65). Looking at children’s oral and written versions of the same story, we can see how much more confidently they use storytelling techniques in an oral rather than a written version. But it is also interesting to see how dependent an oral version can be on previously heard written versions. Eight year old Rhian writes a story, The Party in Transylvania’, (Slater 1995):

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