Didacticism and the Ends of Storytelling: Benjamin’s Medievalism and Forms of Knowledge in Sendebar

Abstract

This article examines two texts, Sendebar, a collection of exempla translated from Arabic into Castilian in the thirteenth century, and Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay “The Storyteller: Observations on the Work of Nikolai Leskov” in order to offer a nuanced account of the relationship of knowledge and wisdom to the ends of storytelling and historicity. Benjamin’s essay is examined by paying particular attention to the place of the medieval in his figuration of storytelling and didacticism. His analysis of storytelling’s demise will then allow a way out from an impasse in Sendebar criticism, namely the debate over how seriously one should take the collection’s didactic aims, and offer a reading of the collection that is attentive to storytelling as itself a form of knowledge.

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