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Abstract
This essay examines Stewart's Bridges Not Walls: A Book about Interpersonal Communication as a textual artifact in discussing dialogic storytelling. Using interpretive qualitative research, we detail the philosophy of dialogic storytelling and then engage in an interpretation of Bridges Not Walls. This essay first situates our interpretive path through the metaphors of historicity, temporal common center of responsiveness, and horizon of historical consciousness, which manifest dialogic storytelling. The interpretive method used in this essay is a philosophically constructive approach grounded in the work of Gadamer and Ricoeur, which renders the meaning of a text through the “fusion of horizons” of the text and the historical moment while offering a public accounting of that meeting. We next provide a public accounting of the evolution of the study of a relational view of interpersonal communication. We explore Stewart's time-tested interpersonal reader Bridges Not Walls as an artifact of dialogic storytelling; the editions of his work both shape and exhibit a shift in emphasis from transactional, to humanistic, to dialogic interpersonal communication. We address the dialogue of horizons, the “between” of our interpretive metaphors and Bridges Not Walls as a text, suggesting that dialogic storytelling offers a heuristic invitation to understand the varying traditions of human communication.