Cultural Memory in the We Novel

Project Description

Since the beginning of the 21st century, a number of authors have chosen to hand over the narration to a group or a collective. Many of them are written by American authors, such as Julie Otsuka, Joshua Ferris, Kate Walbert or Selby Wynn Schwartz, to name a few, but several European writers have also turned their attention to the group. Nobel-prize winner Annie Ernaux has written a biography from a collective point of view, using an on and a nous, the Danish author Carsten Jensen frames his sailor chronicle Vi, de druknade with an omniscient communal narrator and in Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s Himnaríki og helvíti trilogy, an anonymous mass of dead fishermen follows and focalizes the living and struggling inhabitants on the village Köpingen.

In this research project, I investigate cultural memory in, what I have chosen to call “the we novel”. It is my observation, that many (but not all) of the novels narrated in we-form are either situated in historical time or in the present, looking back. They typically concentrate on traumatic experiences in the past, political injustices, as well as the possibility of a collective guilt.