Storytelling Toolan Analysis

Question
Discuss Toolan’s view that storytelling is a ‘core human activity’ which is directly connected to the ‘making and remaking of our identity and our relationships’ (2006, p. 76 & p. 54).
Storytelling is a core human activity related to identity and relationships

Para 1 Discussion of the nature and importance of spoken narrative in general.
Every day, we speak and communicate with others through the act of telling story. Toolan (2006) says narrative or story is a ‘core’ structuring form, found in major literary genres, such as novels and short stories, folk tales, fairy tales and epics, as well as in other art forms, both verbal and non-verbal, such as pictures and film, ballet and mime, etc. It is also, however, pervasive and routine

Labov (1972) suggest conversational narratives is a fully verballised oral narrative of personal experience that should have two specific functions, namely referential function and evaluative function. Referential function could be found from the narratives temporally sequenced framework of abstract, orientation, complication, resolution and code while evaluative function the narrator presents particular perspective to evaluate through the audience responses. For instance, Labov asked adolescent African-Americans to tell him about a dangerous situation that they have experienced, evaluative effects are found through the narrator, e.g. external evaluation from adding an explanation or additional description to highlight particular point, embedded evaluation from putting evaluation comments into the characters in the narrative, as well as different kinds of comparisons and intensifiers, like gestures, sound effects, quantifiers, repetition, all of them provided emphasis and created a climax of the narrator. Labov (1972) emphasis evaluative devices enable to tell us whether the story is terrifying, dangerous, wild, crazy, amusing, hilarious, wonderful or even strange enough to be reported. Toolan (2006) mostly agress Labov’s concept on report actions/events in its order and the telling sequence, however, Toolan (2006) believes some part of the

Bock (2006) uses Labov’s narrative structure and follows Gee in dividing the narratives into stanzas. This is a hybrid of analysis and Bock believes it is very effective and convincing since Labov’s narrative structure allows her to identify the framework of the narrative in order to dig out the notion of evaluation and in the same time, Gee’s structuring the narrative by grouping it into lines, stanzas and parts allows her to highlights the overarching narrative as well as the mini-narrative under the big umbrella of the narrative itself. Apart from that, through the story from Bock, Toolan (2006) believes story has no time constraint; it can be re-opened anytime by the speaker differently with the fact amended or