ABSTRACT
The history of storytelling extends over the entirety of cultural history. It is a very diverse history, if we can refer to it as one history at all. Still, we do not know of any cultural world without storytelling, without being populated by homo narrans. It is therefore astonishing that academic language studies have only recently discovered narrative as a powerful cultural form and discursive practice whose scope goes far beyond the sphere of literature and written texts. This “discovery”, sometimes referred to as the narrative turn, can be viewed from different angles. Underlying this chapter is a cultural approach to narrative. It suggests that we conceive of narrative as a cultural discourse in a twofold sense: first, because stories and storytelling are inextricably embedded in cultural contexts of action and interaction and interwoven with larger social webs of symbolic meanings and, second, because they only exist as part of a multitude of diverse cultural traditions. Although narratives are always shaped by cultural traditions, they simultaneously also impact on them, and they do so in a wide spectrum of options, ranging from the affirmative and supportive to the critical and alternative. In what follows, I explain these two ideas which are intertwined in several respects.
