First-person plural narration can render historically silenced collective experience
Evidence
Otsuka’s novel of Japanese picture brides arriving in early 20th-century California unfolds in first-person plural (“we”). The collective voice itself is the formal innovation. Its method is choric historical novel. The Buddha in the Attic is essential for COMM doctoral work on collective voice, gendered migration, and the rhetorical possibilities of “we.” Otsuka models how literary form can render historically silenced experiences, raising questions relevant to corpus-based AI training: whose voices get aggregated, whose remain singular, and what is lost in either operation. — , The Braided Reading EPUB, 199
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to corpus-based AI training debates about voice aggregation — echoes the reader’s work on access systems and aggregated vs. singular voices. — connects to: A displaced group’s collective unconscious changes within a century; Shifting focalization across protagonists deliberately produces uneven perspective; Omniscient narration can preempt paranoid misreadings of a Muslim character (+3 more)
- SEED: The choric narrator as a model for whose voices AI training corpora aggregate could seed an essay on literary form informing LLM training-data critique.