- Storytelling: Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Perspectives, and: Telling Stories the Kiowa Way
These two slim volumes address, in different ways, how "storytelling" is understood or studied by modern scholars. The accurate transcription of oral tradition once provided the focus for the examination of "stories," but in recent years the range of what may be included has been greatly expanded. Oral tradition itself may include more than recitations of precisely memorized "texts" or tales ritually presented by a culture's "specialists" who maintain and transmit these narratives. The Inuit even transmit historical events with great accuracy (e.g., E. Behrisch, "On the Trail of an Arctic Tale" in Storytelling). Among some peoples, the transmission of tales as a narrative form may continually expand the culture's history through oral tradition. Researchers may find it difficult to recognize how the performance of a narrator or storyteller falls into a specific cultural pattern or reflects cultural rules. Other cultures have a carefully delineated set of "folk" tales that are separate and distinct from recitations of "recent" history. A major question in the investigation of any culture is whether stories heard by a researcher are narratives of actual events, providing a history; or myths, such as creation legends; or something else. What is "truth" may be a central issue in this research. How the tales are told may be a different issue.
Scholars now vary widely in their views of what constitutes oral history, or those narratives purporting to recall actual events. Storytelling itself, or the narrative performance, is but one part of the process. A discussion of these many issues helps when generating any scholarly work relating to stories. Neither of these volumes provides a definition for "storytelling" and no distinction is made between folktales, [End Page 246] narrative performance, or the transmission of ordinary information and gossip. The issue of distinguishing between a traditional folktale and the telling of a modern story needs to be addressed.
In Storytelling, Blayer and Sanchez selected eleven outstanding papers from the 1999 International Conference on the Story. The vitality of the discipline is revealed in the wide range of approaches, subjects, and attitudes represented by this set of studies. The editors are to be congratulated for their good work, but the disparate approaches reflected in the range of subjects covered by these papers creates a problem of focus common to volumes based on diverse conference papers.
Kay Stone's lead chapter "Stones on the Mountain: Crossing Borders into a Story" discusses several points relating to different versions of this tale. Her concern with the telling of the tale, as much as with its content and comparative forms, reveals a mix of scholarly inquiry and storytelling, reflecting the inclusive tone of this volume. Space limitations allow only a few brief notes on some of the remaining chapters. Brian Sturm focuses on contemporary storytellers themselves and how they relate to their audiences. Performance, rather than any aspect of the story itself, thus becomes the center of study. C. Federici examines the limits of interpretation in understanding a "story," as exemplified by his own reading of the novels of Umberto Eco. Thus the ways in which a "story" is received by a reader, who may not share either culture or language with the author, provides a focus for Federici. Whereas E. De Costa confronts various issues relating to the title of the book using "the Latin American Testimonio" (p. 41), she unfortunately does not have enough space to elaborate on these points, including those relating to Rigoberta Menchú's controversial "pseudo-autobiography" (p. 47).
Karen Seago's "Constructing the Witch" and E. Virgulti's wonderful "The Medieval Legend of the Eaten Heart" are particularly fine pieces and are brilliantly constructed. Allyson Wenzowski and Debi Keir-Nicholson offer a provocative note on "The Geist of the Grimms." Several of the other papers, though well written and carefully edited, fall at the...