ABSTRACT
There’s actually a pretty quick way to shake off any assumptions that post-literacy—and, even more, post-print—storytelling tradition inherently more sophisticated and refined than that of oral predecessors or, worse, proof of inborn superiority. Literate and literary as people may be—just imagine Nobel literature prize laureates such as Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Toni Morrison, and Orhan Pamuk collectively playing the game—communication breaks down with startling ease when it has to travel by word of mouth. Even the word storytelling becomes more rich and complicated in the prelit context. In earlier times, all that knowledge was bound together or, at the least, stored in ways less scientific or systematic than today, including in rituals and religion, in carvings to stoke memory, and in hero-driven songs. As the people shall see—and as the classicist Eric Havelock once economically put it—what they communicate, and what they can communicate, alters substantially in an environment where knowers cannot be separated from what they know.
