Storied Conflict Talk

Book excerpt: Narrative analyses routinely investigate autobiographical and interview data. This book examines "narratives-in-interaction" co-constructed by participants in formal mediation sessions, by asking how many of the five cases in the videotaped data display the adversarial narrative pattern pervasive within the interpersonal conflict literature, and secondly what other narrative patterns may be present, and how do they work? Focusing simultaneously at the utterance level and the macro-levels present within the larger dispute context, this book reveals situated communicative practices by which interlocutors interactively construct, resist, reproduce, and intertextually transform adversarial narratives to produce outcomes consonant with their underlying interests. In contrast to the dramaturgical model traditionally used in narrative research, this book illuminates the emergent, microgenetic character of narrative development.