First Person, Third Person, First/Third Person? Challenging Vision and Perspective in Narrative

A panel to be pitched for inclusion in the 2025 conference of the International Society for the Study of Narrative in Miami, April 2–6, 2025.

Organizer: Joe McLaughlin, University of Toronto

Is there really such a thing as third-person perspective? Is it possible to define first-person perspective without making reference to the third-person? The tension between first- and third-person perspectives is so complex and profound that the “need to reconcile” them has been called “the single most important unsolved problem in science,” as well as religion (Ramachandran & Blakelee 1998: 229). Its purview extends closer to our lived concerns, too: the tension between first- and third-person accounts lies at the heart of how we experience being consciously embodied in the world. We have our vivid but narrow, on-the-ground vision of the world through our sensory faculties, and we can abstract that point of view in order to understand the world on a systemic level. And yet it seems impossible to truly hold both visions at once. The best we can do, it seems, is toggle between these imperfect modes. Such vacillations are rarely comfortable, though there is perhaps a lot to learn from the discomfort.

Narrative theory, with its enduring and sophisticated lexicon of narrative voice, seems particularly well suited to investigate the innumerable ways in which first- and third-person perspectives clash, merge, alternate or otherwise interact in fields as various as literary studies, linguistics, philosophy, ethics, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis, political science, religious studies and physics. 

I invite papers that reflect on the first-third-person problem from any and all perspectives and disciplines. Papers that focus on a single object of analysis that problematizes the tension between first- and third- person are especially welcome.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Omniscience in fiction and other contexts
• Authorship, authority, and narrative voice
• Genre, form, and capacities of vision
• Individual agency and morality within a complex world
• The problem of qualia
• The weather-climate distinction
• Personal vs impersonal voice in academic writing
• Psychonarration, free, indirect discourse, and other strange narrative perspectives
• First- and third-person as related to other famous binaries: public and private, masculine and feminine, present and past, etc.

To be considered for the panel, please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words and a brief academic bio (in the same document) to joe.mclaughlin@mail.utoronto.caby November 27 2024. If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me.