A Re-Invention of Language: War, National Community and a Poetics of the First-Person Plural
Journal: transcript Verlag eBooks
Year: 2024

In this essay I explore how, in times of crisis, literary discourse constructs, maintains, and questions the fraught "we" of a nation across a variety of genres.In a wellknown argument Benedict Anderson defines nations, these relatively young social formations, as imagined communities and suggests that the two genres particularly adept in the task of imagining such communities have been the novel and the newspaper.For example, when a novel addresses its readers with a "we," it implies an expecta