Jason Schneiderman – The Ambiguous You (July 2022)

A particular quirk of English is that “you” is often used to mean “me,” or just a general person threatening to collapse back into the speaker or back into the general person. Starting with Martin Buber’s theological contention that the self changes depending on what the self is in relationship to, Schneiderman considers texts—among them, works by Kevin Young, Wanda Coleman, and Natasha Rao— in which the second person shifts its meaning as the text moves forward.