ABSTRACT
Let’s begin by imaginarily returning to the classroom where my students have just taken part in that game of Broken Telephone. For, after initiating them into the pressures that orality can place on communicating (even a single line of) story, I engage them in another exercise; and I do so primarily to stimulate their own discernment of traits that might be intrinsic to a narrative when composed and transmitted exclusively by word of mouth. This exercise entails asking a student, who is publicly willing to endure potential embarrassment, to recount for the class a story they remember from their earliest days. My only instructions are that the story be one with which most, if not all, of us are familiar, and one that they remember less as something read than as something told. Typically, the tale of choice is “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” or “Little Red Riding Hood.” While on the surface my request may appear an invitation for the performance of something silly or childish, my reasons for requesting a story from their earliest. years are actually quite judicious. They’re certainly not born of my wanting students to equate orality with a state of innocence or intellectual juvenility. Rather, I solicit a story from their youth because childhood is the period—at least, in the customary context of industrialized societies—before humans are inculcated into a literate way of thinking, into a mentality contoured by reading and writing. As a result, these are the stories that are most likely to bear still the imprint of oral inflection.
