The emotional arcs of political narratives

Abstract

According to Reagan et al. (2016) all narratives follow the profile of some emotional arcs. The authors, who start from an idea of the writer Kurt Vonnegut (1995), distinguish between the concept of ‘plot’ – which captures the mechanics of a narrative –, and what they call ‘emotional arcs’, which capture the emotional experience that is evoked in the reader. In this article we propose a critical analysis of the concept of emotional arcs, and test the model of analysis with which the emotional arcs of a narrative are evaluated in the context of specific situations of political communication. The results suggest that for a better understanding of the emotional content of a speech we need to consider the emotional component of each type of semiotic resources that a political actor performs during a speech.