The Storyteller Essays
In the introduction to this book Samuel Titan writes: "“In both texts, Benjamin argues that landmark transformations of artistic forms can only be understood if studied in association with equally landmark changes in the deep domain of work and technology. Read in this light, Benjamin’s letter seems to suggest that what happens to narrative once it is cut off from experience is perfectly comparable to what happens to the work of art once it is cut loose from its crafted materiality, becomes an “image,” and starts to circulate much in the way money does. Read with hindsight, this is strikingly prescient: Benjamin points a finger toward our own time, in which—in another reversal of fate, though now a dismal one—storytelling and narrative have become key, cant terms in the vocabulary of corporate branding and political propaganda, the better to keep us from realizing that these are just the things of which modern life, with its flows of information and omnipresent algorithms, is bereft.“The Storyteller” shows Benjamin the critic at his seismographic best. "
