I’ve covered some of the basics in the introduction to this field in my last posts. This post will be about adjacent areas to storytelling. This is important in order to be able to distinguish the distinctiveness of storytelling, and thus understanding its power on a deeper level.
For this post to be brief enough to keep you reading, but still cover what I think are important adjacent areas, I will only touch base here, and then circle back to deepening and personal reflections of each one of those, in the coming posts. This part tends to be a bit heavy on the theoretical side, and maybe not the most entertaining text to read. For this, I apologize on forehand and ask of you; bear with me.
It is important to see and acknowledge all the heavy groundwork done by those that came before us. They help us understand, and reach further out. In this context, I look at the adjacent areas in terms of the nature of storytelling, not in terms of the packaging.
One of the closely related areas is narratology. Narratology addresses what the narrative – the story – looks like. How it is constructed. The building parts. One of the earliest narratologists, Vladimir Propp, said in his Morphology of the folktale (1928) that all stories can be analyzed from a general structure. There are different types of characters and different kind of events that can all be sorted under this general structure. I will talk more about this in later posts.
Mossberg & Johansen (2006) is of the meaning that there are three areas that foremost surrounds storytelling as a form of communication;
- literature and linguistics, and most importantly the classic rethorics, that has been regarded as the foundation of all modern communication theory,
- the narrative onset within marketing, and
- organizational theory
I will shortly touch on some of the connections between storytelling and rethorics. Rethorics is also described as the art of persuasion. The word “rethorics” comes from the Greek word Rheo – “I speak fluently”. The Narratio was a central part of the speeches disposition, and should answer seven questions; who, what, why, where, when, how, with help of what?
The narration thus lays the foundation for what is today defined as a story, which we also can interpret from Aristoteles definition (see coming text). Again, please stay with me in coming posts, and I will dig deeper into this area as well.
One area of importance in terms of construction of the story and it’s effects is the cognitive psychology. Green, Strange and Brock writes about this in an enlightened way in their Narrative Impact; social and cognitive foundations (2002). I will loop back to this.
For now, I will settle with summarizing this up. The story has been following humans from the campfires to the universities, the parliaments and the entertainment industry. The purpose of the story has always been, and still is, to reach the mind of the recipient.
A footprint in the soul.
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