![]() ![]() However, this isn’t necessarily as straightforward as it seems. It has an explicit oral element that allows it to spread and be incorporated into an individual’s life in a way that the novel cannot. First, for Benjamin, the Story is something that is told. ![]() While we now use the term “story” to indicate any sort of narrative, Benjamin is referring to “story” as its own unique genre. The story, it seemed, was losing to modernity and the new form of the Novel was rising up to take its place. Travelers no longer engage in trade in the way that seafaring merchants used to, there is no longer the need to swap stories and news. At home, work lacked the artisanship and personal element that allowed for a knowledge of local stories and history: in modern life nobody talks while working or incorporates their work and their stories. Veterans who came back had experienced that which was too terrible to speak of. So starts Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay “The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov.” To Benjamin, who lived through the first World War, the art (or “craft” as he likes to call it) of storytelling was dying out due to the impoverishment of experience. ![]() One meets with fewer and fewer people who know how to tell a tale properly.” “The art of storytelling is coming to an end. ![]()
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