Introduction - Text 1
Narrative has always been a dominant cultural form, perhaps because of its extraordinary power to synthesize: the time and experience of the individual and of communities, in the past as well as in the future foreseen. Like all human activities that require tools and know-how, developed over time and standardized, repeated and transmitted over generations, the art of storytelling quickly became a technē or an ars. At first, this technique, in its very practice, was inseparable from orality – which relies on the bard’s or the actor’s memory and performance – and in its transmission – which was based on the example given by the master and the imitation carried out by the student by gesture and speech. But with the growth of writing, and later printing, the art of storytelling was formalized and systematized, and its principles and techniques were recorded and transmitted by text.
