ABSTRACT
Much as “The Folksinger” did in the early 1960s, “The Storyteller” has developed a certain mythic resonance in popular culture and language—perhaps more in the way of a poetic conceit than an anthropologically specific role. Yet it depends for its emotive force on the idea that somewhere, sometime, there was, or even is such a role—a role with expressive, didactic, oracular, cathartic, and community-binding functions. Enough people have resubscribed to the idea over the last 20 years to have created little subcultural pockets of what performance theorist Richard Schechner calls “restored behaviors” (Schechner, 35–116). These pockets, taken collectively, constitute what is known within them as “the storytelling community,” and “the storytelling revival.”
