This issue of Departures in Critical Qualitative Research asks us to attend to the importance of the practice of storytelling and the storyteller in our scholarship and in our lives. Walter Benjamin's prescient 1936 essay “The Storyteller” presents an argument for the role of the storyteller in communicating and meaningfully understanding experience in the age of “information.” Benjamin contrasts the relational and collaborative craft of the storyteller against the individualized, isolated, and ultimately untranslatable work of the novelist, noting that the storyteller “takes what he [sic] tells of experience—his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale.”1 The co-constitutive force of storytelling and Benjamin's storyteller are beautifully illustrated and enacted in each of the essays in this issue.
In “Stranger Than Fiction,” William K. Rawlins addresses the notion of offering counsel in the...
University of California Press