Traditional Oral Culture in the Modern Media World of Asia - The case of Chinese Storytelling

Project leader Vibeke Børdahl
Manager of database: Jens-Chr. Sørensen
Research assistants: Yu Jing, Ole Fossgård, Feng Yining, Hu Juan, Huang Ying
Funding foundation: Norwegian Research Council, Program for Cultural Studies

Chinese storytelling has an unbroken history of more than a thousand years. This professional art has survived in oral transmission to our present time, and therefore offers a unique territory for research in oral tradition. The profession is threatened by the modern society and the arrival of modern media-technology, but this situation also offers new possibilities for preserving the arts that are still alive today. The project investigates the interplay between oral and written traditions in the Chinese popular culture and the role of the new electronic media for this culture.

The relationship between oral and written traditions in the oral and oral-related genres of Chinese literature is investigated from a diachronic and synchronic descriptive perspective. Focus is on the story "Wu Song Fights the Tiger", handed down in written genres for reading and for performance since around 1300, and in oral genres of performance with broad distribution in different dialectal areas of China. The main topics of research are:

• The written legacy of storytelling in folk-book, novel, drama, and folklore works.
• The oral testimony of storytelling in the performed narrative arts of the last half century.
• Storytelling in the mediaworld - present conditions and possibilities for the future.
• The project includes the establishment of a research database on this website.

Output: