The nature of narrative authority c

The nature of narrative authority changed with the advent of print culture and the conditions of modern narrative construction that I discussed in chapter 1. This is a point that Walter Benjamin makes in his essay, “The Storyteller,” when he distinguishes between the tradition of the oral storyteller and modern written narrative: “The earliest symptom of a process whose end is the decline of storytelling is the rise of the novel at the beginning of modern times. What distinguishes the novel from the story (and from the epic in the narrower sense) is the essential dependence on the book.