Comparison of Greek and Asian Storytelling

[Name of the Institute]

Comparison of Greek and Asian Storytelling

Introduction

In much part of the world, today, the arrival of reading, writing and media have made stories easily accessible. Nevertheless, even today the concept of storytelling has not been diminished completely and is still practiced widely in all parts of the world. Story telling is a natural psychological process, where the human brain is the main tool of creativity. The brain contains the hippocampus which processes, encodes, and distributes the string of events to other parts of the brain to be preserved and retrieved. In simple words, storytelling is delivering the events, words, and images occurring inside the mind of a storytelling, with certain adornment or exaggeration. It has practiced in various cultures of the world and functions as a source of entertainment, moral and for cultural restoration.

When the world storytelling comes to our mind, it usually brings the perception of bedtime stories we heard as children but little do we know that storytelling has been around for thousands of years. Even today, the actual history from where storytelling originated has been ambiguous. This could be clearly denoted by Ruth Sawyer's statement, “I know of no other group of artists, are they painters, architects, or composers, who have not gone into their own past, keen to gather all that, had a bearing on their art.”Moreover, she also wrote, “I have found too few storytellers in this country (America) who have looked beyond the hand that compiled or wrote their favorite collection of stories for them.” (Ruth Sawyer, 1945).

Nevertheless, few of the folklorists belonging to different countries have done a thorough and detailed research on storytelling (J.R.Adams, 1967), and almost no information is easily available regarding the Graeco-Roman world's storytellers. Moreover, what little information there is, either incomplete, not accessible or has no proper work of reference (W.Aly Volksmärchen, 1969). The Greeks had the privilege to enjoy their golden age from the early fifth to the late fourth century BC, and despite this era ending around. 2,500 years ago and the impact of this successful civilization are even apparent in today's world. Literature played a huge role in the success of this civilization. Most of the literature used today in the modern Western literary is indebted to the classical and prehistoric Greek literature. Despite the availability of less information regarding storytelling in the Greek era, certain similar areas could be seen in both the Roman world and China. Therefore, it was likely that comparison would take place and also because detailed information about the Chinese storytellers was readily available. However, there is no evidence to suggest that Greek storytelling owes its methods to Chinese storytelling or vice versa.

History of Greek Storytelling

The first form of art used in Greek literature was Storytelling. The Latin terms for storytellers are, “Fabulator” or “aretalogus,” which all mean "storyteller". In Greek terms it is denoted either as a, historian or writer of prose, a professional speech writer at Athens, a writer ...