Narration and Escalation. An Empirical Study of Conflict Narratives

Abstract

This article describes the methodology and the outcomes of an empirical study of conflict narratives. The narratological analysis deployed narratological catego­ries in the structuralist tradition based on Genette and was conducted with the help of the text annotation tool CATMA. The analysis aimed at covering as many narratological phenomena as possible by establishing 14 fields of narrato­logical phenomena that were annotated in a corpus of 39 factual narratives about situations at the workplace with and without conflicts. The evaluation of approximately 28,000 annotations brought to light a series of interrelations be­tween narratological phenomena and the presence or absence of conflicts in the narratives. Additionally, this approach led to the identification of some over­sights of narrative theory by detecting hitherto unnoticed interrelations among narratological concepts.