ABSTRACT
In the beginning was the social story: we are story-narrating animals ceaselessly creating stories and dwelling in story-telling societies. As we humans tell our stories, listen to the stories of others and story our lives, our tales come to haunt, shape and transform our social worlds. Humans may be the ubiquitous story tellers and we may be very good at telling stories every day of our lives. But we may be less good at understanding them. Narrative understanding requires the space to sit and stare, ponder and puzzle and life often does not offer such a space. Narrative understanding must take us to this further land. There are now a mess of literary and scientific methods to dissect stories. Amongst others, we have content analysis, argumentation analysis, semiotic analysis, rhetorical analysis, interpretive phenomenological analysis, discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis, situational analysis, conversational analysis, free associational analysis, biographic-narrative analysis, thematic analysis, visual analysis and many others.
