Judy Doenges: We Are One – First Person Plural (July 2009)

How does a literature focused almost exclusively on the life of the individual make room for the occasional work of fiction that uses a collective first-person narrator? How does using such a point of view impact the contract between writer and reader? In this lecture, Judy Doenges looks at Ayn Rand’s Anthem as a negative and Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End as a positive example of the possibilities and ramifications, both aesthetic and political, of writing fiction in the first-person plural.