Collective Experience in Narrative:Conclusions and Proposals - Eva von Contzen and Maximilian Alders

Abstract:

All human life and all human interaction are profoundly social: our everyday lives do not take place in isolation but constantly require our engagement with other people. That the shared, engaged, and joint aspects of experience feature prominently in narratives as well is beyond dispute. Yet literary critics have tended to privilege the private, individual aspects of experience over their shared dimension and neglected the powerful influence of group or collective experiences. Taking our cue from Palmer’s approach, the essays in this special issue have explored the ways in which collective experience is realized and functionalized in a trajectory that spans several centuries and genres. Together the essays show that collective experience covers a wide range of group phenomena that can themselves be represented through a variety of techniques. It can include collectives from dyads to nations and its representation exerts its full force when it is intertwined with such elements of narrative as focalization, time, character, and even action. These representations typically throw into sharp relief not only what is shared, but also what is individual and single—and they function in different ways in different narratives, but they always create effects different from representations of solitary experience. Contrary to individual experience, collective experience is necessarily rooted in (shared) patterns of action and behavior. The sense of a joint consciousness emerges from such patterns of action.

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/580508/summary