| Sumario: | This article adopts a phenomenological approach to the notion of "story," drawing most of its examples from texts in the fantasy genre. It proposes that a key to the nature and significance of stories may lie in the experiences to which they predictably give rise, something foreshadowed in the famous passage from Sidney's Apology for Poesie of 1581 about "a tale which keepeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner." These experiences are: inevitability; timelessness; realness; loss of self; loss of agency; independence of authorship; addictiveness; dissociation; invocation and containment of threat; and temporary transformation. Additionally, while stories are experienced as intensely meaningful, they resist analysis. The author argues that many of these typical experiences can be illuminated by a knowledge of the differential functioning of the brain's two cortical hemispheres. Drawing on the work of McGilchrist (2009), he proposes that stories are best understood as invitations to re-inhabit the world of the "Old Brain," as represented by the right hemisphere of the cortex. On this basis, he suggests a definition of story as a languaged right hemisphere communication that elicits in its audiences a return to the world of early childhood, in which everything is "all new, and all true," a world in which our "observing selves" are not yet fully operational, and in which we therefore merge with story characters and story events, a world that seems full of meaning-a meaning which we are unable to separate from the concrete people and events in which it is embedded, and which nevertheless offers us an experience, however brief, of self-transformation.
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