Joseph Sobol

Contemporary Storytelling: Revived Traditional Art and Protean Social Agent

Contemporary storytelling has constructed itself as a compound of tradition-based performing art and a social agent in a variety of applied fields. Beginning as a folk revival movement in the mold of the folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s, storytelling generated a network of festivals, concert series, and guilds in the 1970s and 1980s, promoting a romantic image of the storyteller as solo artist with traditional associations and contemporary messages. More recently, this artistic thrust has been complicated by the articulate emergence of applied storytelling in a range of mainstream domains, including education, business, health care, and law. At the same time, the limitations of the nostalgia-driven ethos of revivalist performance have become increasingly evident and artistically constricting. This essay briefly surveys the artistic reach and limitations of storytelling as a contemporary performing art form, then explores the historical, theoretical, and practical implications of these evolving, m...

Oracy in the New Millennium: Storytelling Revival in America and Bhutan

Starting in the 1970s there has been a significant wave of storytelling revivalism in the United States, Canada, and across much of Western Europe. Drawing on earlier revivals of oral traditional or “folk” music, dance, and crafts, this revival has spawned a new class of freelance professional storytellers along with a broader network of enthusiasts who make use of oral stories as tools in a variety of amateur and applied professional settings (especially education, business, ministry, and health care). Because this revival has taken root in an advanced technological society with a longstanding commitment to (if not actual realization of) universal literacy, it occupies a cultural position that blends conservative and radical elements. Storytellers affirm their commitment to traditional values of community memory, interconnectedness, localism, and ethnic heritage, while at the same time placing these attitudes in the service of potentially hegemonic, homogenizing forces. This paper will explore these para...