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“Who is David?” asks a wealthy and churlish land‐owner, Nabal, in a belittling manner (I Samuel, 25:2). “Whose son is this man?” asks Israel's first king, Saul, as David goes out to fight Goliath—in spite of the narrative fact that David has already been introduced to Saul. “Who am I, O Lord God?” asks David later in the story, after Saul's death and his own rise to power: “who am I….that you have brought me this far?” (II, 7:18). Uncovering and solving this story's implicit questions—and explicit, as above—depends on close attention to the dozen or so broad patterns of repetition governing the narrative's progress. The ancient storyteller relied on techniques of repetition geared for skilled listeners, and within these various kinds of repetition were discovered the story's embedded meaning, its mysteries of character, action, and moral vision.

This chapter addresses Herodotus' relationship with his major narrative model, Homer, whose techniques Herodotus appropriates and develops. Homer's depiction of motivation supplies a perspective in which to view Herodotus' methods: the epic storyteller's stance of omniscience illuminates the wholly different position of the historian—whose access to events is compromised by differences in time and space.

This chapter begins with the author's story of how a compelling passage in Siri Hustvedt's essay “Yonder” immediately brought to his mind the life and work of the painter Ian Fairweather. It then explores the thesis that art and philosophy carry the risk of estranging us from the world at the same time that they hold out the promise of helping us reengage more adroitly with it. It is perhaps this ambiguity that makes us suspicious of thinkers and artists, for they unsettle our certainties as well as show us new ways of understanding our existence. The author describes the life and work of a Kuranko storyteller, in an attempt to bring into sharper relief the struggle that lies at the heart of all imaginative activity, both intellectual and artistic, to strike and sustain a balance between distancing oneself from the world and achieving a more vital involvement with it.

This chapter considers the institutional and discursive contexts within which the Hiroshima survivors' identities as hibakusha were rendered multiple and complex as they began to actively adopt identities as witnesses and storytellers. It explores how these categories encouraged survivors to recollect and narrate their experiences as something inextricably embedded in their entire life stories. The survivors often engage in their testimonial practices while accompanying pilgrims to Hiroshima on memorial tours.

This chapter discusses the impact of the emergent forces in contemporary popular culture that have a direct influence on Joyce' conception of artistic creativity and explorations of the possibilities of fiction especially in his last two books Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The introduction of new communication means particularly the introduction of phonograph that may have influenced and impacted on the writings of Joyce. In this chapter, Joyce' response to the technology of sound is examined wherein he found a realization and awareness of the beauty that had vanished in the silent reading of the printed text; rather than disappearing, the voice of the storyteller becomes the “talking machine” of the new modernist novel.

This chapter explores the relation between violence and justice in Giorgio Agamben's work. It investigates the essential role that Walter Benjamin's classic essay ‘Critique of Violence’ plays for Agamben. This essay is a foundational text for Agamben's study of sovereign power. It shows links between Benjamin's obscure notion of ‘divine violence’ and his essay on ‘The Storyteller’. Carl Schmitt's sovereignty confirms the dialectic between violence and the law; Benjamin's divine violence breaks with it. Agamben's reading of Oedipus and the Sphinx turns into an implicit critique of Benjamin when he develops his preference of the enigmatic Sphinx over and against the transparency that Oedipus brings into a reflection on the story. The distinction between the violent political strike and the nonviolent proletarian strike makes perfect sense in the context of Agamben's reading of the Benjamin-Schmitt debate.

This chapter reconstructs the series of references, left largely unexamined by Giorgio Agamben himself, that gather around the central notion of ‘the idea of prose’. It reviews the origin of this movement in three major texts of Walter Benjamin: ‘The concept of criticism in German Romanticism’, ‘The Storyteller’, and the preparatory notes to his final text ‘On the Concept of History’. According to Benjamin, the basic epistemological presuppositions of the early Romantic concept of criticism are entirely concentrated in the concept of reflection. ‘The idea of poetry is prose’: this formula, according to Benjamin, is the ‘final determination’ of the early Romantic idea of art. The idea of poetry as that of prose must be confronted — according to that salient expression which, more than two decades later, suffuses Benjamin's very last fragments — with the idea of prose, understood, precisely, as that of poetry.

In this chapter, Cordi illustrates what it means to be a storytelling teacher. He then explains his role in researching his work as a storyteller performer and teacher. He talks about the limitations of the study.

Cordi shares how he resisted changing his definition of storytelling. He outlines what it traditionally means to be a professional storyteller and how he discovered what he knows. He then shows how he used storytelling as a high school educator and how he was able to listen to his students more when he stopped to listen. He shows how student stories are the curriculum he works to follow. Subsequently, forming a storytelling club at his schools.

This and the following two chapters look at the reciters and storytellers who would frequent the coffeehouses of Cairo and other towns in the evenings, particularly during religious festivals. This chapter focuses on the poets (“shoara”) who would recite, by memory, tales of the adventures of Aboo Zeyd, a story based on events that supposedly took place in middle of third century AH, but were composed later. These tales are said to be informative on the subject Bedouin customs and traditions. The recitations were half prose and half poetry, with some music. The poet would play a few notes on a viol after every verse, and was sometimes accompanied by another instrument. This chapter includes a summary of a volume of the story, plus a translation of some of the poetry and musical notation.

The second type of reciters, along with poets described in previous chapter, are storytellers (“mohadditeen,”) of which there were around thirty in Cairo. They also did public performances, but their narration was of a work called “The Life of Ez-Zahir,” based on the history of the Sultan Baybars, who reigned in the second half of the seventh century AH. Printed copies of this tale existed in several volumes, written around one hundred years previously in Egyptian colloquial Arabic, but the original author was unknown. This chapter includes a translation of an extract from the second volume, but stresses that the entertainment in large part derived from the improvisation and wit of the storyteller.

The third type of reciters, along with the storytellers and poets of the previous two chapters, mainly told the story of ‘Antar (Seeret ‘Antar) and were therefore known as “‘Antariah.” They also told other tales, such as Seerat Delhemeh or stories from A Thousand and One Nights. There were around six of them in Cairo. They performed without music, chanting the poetry from memory and reading the prose. This chapter also includes summaries of some of the tales told and translations of some of the poetry.

This chapter describes how humans are ceaseless, inveterate storytellers, making up stories to explain to ourselves how the world was formed and what our place in it is. For the most part, these are myths and metaphors, and we recognise them as such. However, in just the last few hundred years, with the help of the ‘scientific method’, we have begun to construct a story that is different from these. After many revisions we can hope that this new story will converge on what actually happened. This method consists of making narratives of possible cause and effect, and then testing them against the real world to see if they are consistent with what we see. Where they are not, the narrative is revised. Where they are, we accept them, for now.

This chapter describes Chretien de Troyes as a master storyteller—an innovator who created the literary tradition of the Arthurian romance, which rose to popularity with his works, was continued in prose form soon after his death, and has lasted to this day in a variety of national literatures. His romances are read by the educated public young and old, figure on school reading lists for courses in literature and history, are a major source of knowledge for details of everyday living in the twelfth century, and can still provide entertainment for those seeking a temporary reprieve from life's pressures. The reasons for this success are many, and although it is impossible to exhaust the subject, as the vast volume of studies on Chretien attests, this chapter explores a few of the more significant ones.